“We Must Begin By Telling The Truth” – Honoring the Resistance of Tule Lake

Saturday, May 16 1-3pm

J-Sei, 1285 66th St, Emeryville, CA 94608

In commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the closing of Tule Lake Segregation Center, join Tule Lake Committee CFO Barbara Takei, Tsuru for Solidarity (TFS) Co-Founder, Satsuki Ina, and filmmaker Emiko Omori for a conversation about the decades-long struggle to correct the false narrative about resistance at Tule Lake, the courageous fight for civil liberties by the Tulean community and the lessons from Tule Lake resistance for the struggle to abolish U.S. immigration detention.  Moderated by TFS Executive Director, Mike Ishii.

This event will include a screening of “Defiant to the Last”. 

Register for in-person tickets or to attend via Zoom. In-person seating is limited

SPEAKERS

Barbara Takei is a public historian and a leading authority on the history of Japanese American resisters who were incarcerated at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Her family was incarcerated at the Tule Lake and Amache concentration camps, and the Griffith Park and Fort Bliss Army internment camps.  She has served on the Tule Lake Committee board for over two decades, working to honor the stories of Japanese American grassroots resistance and to prevent government desecration of the Tule Lake site.  Her introduction to Asian American political organizing began in the 1960s as a member of The Detroit Asian Political Alliance. She is the co-author of Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History of the Tule Lake Concentration Camp.

Satsuki Ina, Ph.D. was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center.  She is co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites and support front-line immigrant and refugee communities being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies.  She is a psychotherapist specializing in child and family counseling and is a leading authority on multigenerational community trauma.  Dr. Ina received an Emmy award for her film, “Children of the Camps”, and is the author of “The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment and Protest”. 

Emiko Omori is a groundbreaking cinematographer and film director who was incarcerated as a toddler with her family at the Poston concentration camp during WWII.  After studying film at San Francisco State University, she became one of the first female Asian American cinematographers at KQED in 1968.  Her defining work, Rabbit in the Moon (1999), explores Japanese American resistance to mass incarceration during WWII. Co-produced with her sister, Chizu, the documentary received both a Sundance Best Cinematography Award and an Emmy for Outstanding Historical Programming.  In 2025, she released her latest film, Defiant to the Last, which examines the government’s removal of birthright citizenship to allow the deportation of dissident Japanese Americans as enemy aliens.