In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.

Jordan Stanger-Ross, associate professor of history and the project director of Landscapes of Injustice at the University of Victoria, is co-editor of Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

Jordan Stanger-Ross' profile page

• Winner, John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History
• Short-listed, Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize

"Landscapes of Injustice is a particularly impressive and unprecedented study ... [The authors] have brought a fresh take to the wartime history of Japanese Canadians, and their careful research will help convince readers of the lasting implications of the wartime policies for Canadian society." BC Studies

"Well written, clearly and effectively conceived and argued throughout, and intensely moving at times, Landscapes of Injustice is a significant book that both sheds light on the processes of dispossession and racial injustice and demonstrates the utility of collaboration to historians. ... [The authors] have created a deeply important work that challenges long-held beliefs about Canadian exceptionalism. In much the same way that historians have emphasized Canada's status as a settler colonial state, opposed Canada's growing militarism, or highlighted the ways in which violence served as an organizing force in Canadian colonial history, this book serves as a clarion call to Canadians that racism, government oppression, and cruelty do not stop at the forty-ninth parallel on their way north." H-Net

"The Japanese Canadian community owes a large debt to Jordan Stanger-Ross and the Landscapes of Injustice collective for uncovering new facts about the role that the legal system, politicians and widespread anti Japanese-Canadian racism played in our history. The release of Landscapes of Injustice is timely. Post George Floyd, Canadians are discussing systemic racism against Indigenous, Black and persons of colour. Our history is a stark reminder of the harm done by racism to individuals and communities." The Bulletin: A Journal of Japanese Canadian Community, History and Culture

"This is a powerful book, marking a materialist turn in reflection on the internment of Japanese Canadians. The research collective pursues questions which, for all their focus on the details of asset liquidation -- of properties, footholds, intergenerational possibilities, built up slowly and patiently -- are not 'instead of' but deeply part of the human story of the internment. New ethnography and archival research with financial, community, and state records expose the variety of responses by Japanese Canadians, the multiplicity of logics into which officials folded racism, the breadth and variety of complicities. Landscapes of Injustice is vital reading for our moment of thinking about historical wrongs and the (im)possibility of reparations." Jennifer Henderson, Associate Professor, Carleton University, co-editor, Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress

"This outstanding and eminently readable volume increases by an order of magnitude our knowledge and understanding of the tragic persecution of Japanese Canadians during World War II. It should be a model for similar studies of other systems of persecution and property deprivation both north and south of the Canada-US border." Eric Muller, University of North Carolina

"This book is a remarkable and comprehensive addition to studies on Canadian history. …. The book is particularly timely and urgent [as] millions of people are currently being displaced, and 'the politics of security, migration, and race [are] perpetually entwined.' The book addresses hard questions about how states and citizens can protect human rights during times of national insecurity, and what is at stake when they fail to do so." Journal of Canadian History

"Uprooted, interned, dispossessed, dispersed, and exiled. This volume brilliantly tracks the appalling excesses of Canadian white supremacists and the resilient responses of Japanese Canadians. As the authors of this remarkable book conclude, we all walk atop the sediment of landscapes of injustice." Constance Backhouse, University of Ottawa