Tamiko Suzuki isn’t sure when she began asking questions about what happened to her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents during the Second World War. The fourth-generation Vancouverite knew her Japanese Canadian family had been sent inland, but the story always stopped short of the details.

“There was this deep silence and shame around it,” she recalls. “When I asked my mom what happened — I knew something had happened — she’d say she had fond memories of being in the camps, that she got to play outside and spend time with her grandparents.”

Growing up in Vancouver’s Point Grey in the 1960s and ’70s, Suzuki began to understand that this reticence to open up also came with expectations: quiet instructions about who she could be in the world. “We were taught to blend in as much as possible,” she says. “To make people comfortable. I was Tami, not Tamiko. We never used Japanese words or brought food to school that had sushi vinegar, soy sauce or fish.”

The message was subtle but unmistakable: being different carried risk.

“It wasn’t possible to have pride in our Japanese heritage,” she continues. “Because — even if you tried to be the best Canadian possible — there was always the sense that the government could throw you in jail and take away everything you owned.”

For her family, that fear wasn’t abstract. In 1942, her parents, Setsuko Sunahara and David Suzuki, were children when their lives were abruptly upended by the War Measures Act. Their parents and grandparents were among more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians uprooted, stripped of their homes and livelihoods, separated from their communities and sent to hastily built internment camps in British Columbia’s interior.

“After something like that,” Suzuki asks quietly, “why would you want to be proud of where your ancestors came from?”

For decades, that shame lingered, unspoken — not just in her family, but across a community shaped by loss, dispossession and the belief that keeping your head down meant safety.

It was Suzuki’s own children who began to break through the silence. “They were starting to read about it, to piece things together,” she says. “And they were like, ‘Oh my God, this is huge. We’ve got to talk about this.’”

Determined to understand more, Suzuki stopped in the Slocan Valley during a family ski trip, hoping the mountains, lakes and forests might unlock answers words never could. But “there was nothing there,” she remembers. “One of the local farmers had some pictures in a room, but that was about it.”

The absence was jarring. From her reading, she knew that entire communities had existed here — homes, gardens, schools and stores — yet the land held few visible signs. Forests had grown back. Buildings had collapsed or been dismantled. Without names or markers, the sites themselves were quietly slipping from memory. So, by the time she and her children began asking questions, the physical proof of internment had largely disappeared.

Susanne Tabata, CEO of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, says by the late 1980s this tension — between one generation’s silence and another’s yearning for answers — was playing out across parts of the Japanese Canadian community.

“There were lots of tears,” Fredrickson tells me, “but also some good memories.”

Tabata agrees that “terrible things happened, but greatness also happened in small ways.”

Families foraged, gardened and walked the forests. Children skated and tobogganed in winter. Baseball diamonds were cleared. Classrooms were set up in barns and halls. Doukhobor (Russian Christian dissenters) neighbours provided quiet support, helping families prepare for harsh winters. These acts didn’t erase the injustice, but they did help restore dignity. In tending land, teaching children and gathering for games, internees asserted something essential: culture and community could still take root here. As Tabata says, “we can celebrate how they got through it and rebuilt their lives the best they could.”

Back in the 1990s, as survivors worked to piece together their personal memories, valley communities also began to reflect on their civic role in this past. In 1994, the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre opened in New Denver, on the eastern shore of Slocan Lake, featuring artifacts, interpretive panels and three of Orchard Camp’s original wood-frame shacks. Nearby, the volunteer-run Kohan Reflection Garden was planted with Japanese and native species, another way to tell this story through living landscapes.

In 2024, when Suzuki returned to the valley on the current version of the bus tour, Tomoshibi —“Lighting the Way Through” — she found the story was no longer hidden. Tracing the path her parents and grandparents had taken, she could finally fill in the old silence. “They all started in Popoff — that’s where they were divided.”

Her mother’s family was sent to pastoral Lemon Creek, while her father’s were interned in Slocan City. Initially, David Suzuki wasn’t enrolled in school, so he spent a year roaming the hills and forests — it was here he fell in love with nature, leading to his career as an environmental activist and host of the long-running show The Nature of Things.

“The darkness of the story — it’s such a contrast to how beautiful the countryside is,” Tamiko Suzuki says. “Being able to walk there, breathe the air, see the forests growing back… things are healing.”