Join us to hear the inspiring and harrowing history of the Japanese-American Tsuchiya family who were incarcerated at Manzanar in California, one of the sites where 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were taken and held by the federal government during WWII following Pearl Harbor.
Learn how Kiyotsugu Tsuchiya, grandfather of our speaker Lourdes Nicholls, went from being the curator of a famous collection of arms and armor in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s to curating a collection of insects and small objects in the 1940s in a Japanese incarceration camp surrounded by barbed wire. Ms. Nicholls' mother, Fumi Knox, was born at Manzanar and this talk will illustrate the conditions at the incarceration camp through photographs and oral histories that she has collected for several decades.
Lourdes Nicholls grew up in the Bay Area but has lived in the Oak Park, Illinois since 1991. While in high school (1982) Lourdes was assigned to work on her family history report which started as questions for family members but has now become her life passion. She has worked with the Manzanar National Historic Site Visitor Center staff to keep the legacy of her grandfather alive. Currently she is working on a documentary about her family which should come out in 2024.
This is a virtual event. Space is limited. Please register in advance. An email with a Zoom link will be sent closer to the date of tour. This event is free! Sponsored by the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum and the City of Greenbelt.