Marissa S., a rising senior at Leland High School in Almaden Valley, is a fourth-generation Japanese American, and she’s making it her mission to keep her community’s story alive.
As part of her Girl Scout Gold Award project, which requires that her full name not be used, Marissa is collecting stories of families whose relatives were subjected to Japanese-American internment programs during World War II, which included time spent at the Bay Area’s iconic Angel Island. Marissa said she’s been heavily involved in the local Japanese-American community her whole life, but she’s noticed that even within the community, people don’t seem to know much about that time in their history.
“Over the years, I’ve noticed that as people age, all of our culture is being lost because people don’t share what’s important,” Marissa said.
She said she’s noticed the erosion of her culture in small ways. A traditional Japanese dance class she was involved with disbanded after the instructor passed away and no one was available to take her place. She knew early on that she wanted her capstone Girl Scout project to reflect and help preserve her community’s history.
She reached out to a volunteer at Angel Island and pitched him her project: a multi-part effort to educate people in the Bay Area—and ultimately around the country—on how Japanese-Americans were mistreated during World War II. She would interview internees’ descendants, teach workshops and seek out ways to integrate the material into local school curricula. Her contact at Angel Island was immediately on board. Then came the hard part.
She received an extensive list of names of people who were held on the island. She said she was overwhelmed, barely knowing where to start. So, she went to the very bottom of the list and typed the name into an ancestry website. She then scoured obituaries and other records to find the children—and eventually the grandchildren—of the people on the list. She used personal connections and handwritten letters to try to convince the people she tracked down to help her tell their story.history
“It took a while for them to pass around the information collected between themselves,” Marissa said of one of the families she interviewed, “because not one single person knew the whole story. But if you put everybody’s knowledge together, then they were able to kind of construct what really happened.”
In the end, she was able to interview five descendants of internees and collect their families’ stories. She then published these stories online and combined them with her outside research to create weekly webinars, which are available online at https://marissagoldaward.wixsite.com/mysite-1 for anyone to attend. She’s working to make the lessons available on YouTube and other platforms to expand her audience.
She’s also hoping to turn her research into materials teachers can use in their classrooms. She’s in the process of preparing videos, presentations and question guides she thinks will be useful supplements to the middle school curriculum. She plans to pitch the materials to teachers at her school and eventually the superintendent of the school district.
With the help of staff at Angel Island, she’s also creating an exhibit based on her research that she is submitting to museums and cultural centers that might be interested in the story of Japanese-American internment on Angel Island.
Marissa has far exceeded the number of hours she needed to fulfill the requirements of her Gold Award project, but she isn’t finished working. She said the real goal of this effort is to keep these stories in people’s minds.
“After I finished collecting the stories, and I emailed them the finished article that I had written about them, the family members’ reactions to the fact that someone is taking interest and their history, someone’s trying to spread it, was the most rewarding experience,” Marissa said.
She said this project is particularly salient at a time when racism and discrimination are being brought to light nationwide.
“I refuse to let this generation continue with their eyes on the ground, impervious to the consequences of staying silent,” she writes on her website. “I am proud to be a teen leader, keeping history alive in the minds of the youth and making a difference, one person at a time.”
