Constantia Omnia Vincit

A History of the Nisei Students at Tashme High

Abstract

This paper explores youth agency through Japanese Canadian high school students’ experiences during their incarceration at Tashme in 1940s British Columbia. When provincial and federal governments refused to fund their schooling, the teenagers organized their own classes. The Nisei generation then utilised what they learned to aid their Issei parents and the rest of theJapanese Canadian community resist exile from their home country after the Second World War. Through printed essays and petitions to government officials, Tashme High students engaged national discourse on democracy and citizenship. Their political activism typified characteristics of the modern Canadian teenager that emerged in the postwar era.