East Lillooet Japanese-Canadian World War II Interment Camp Site
Written by Jane Carrico
On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had devastating consequences for all of us – Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.
Dr. David Suzuki, Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life
When the Second World War extended to the Asia-Pacific regions the Canadian government culminated decades of prejudice against Japanese Canadians by declaring them “enemy aliens” and immediately confiscating their radios, cameras, vehicles and fishing boats. Under the War Measures Act, residents of coastal communities were to be forcibly removed. Men were sent to road construction camps while women, children and elderly were sent to malodorous and unsanitary livestock barns… before being incarcerated in hastily constructed internment camps and abandoned resource towns beyond an imposed 100-mile coastal restricted zone.
Families who were more financially resourceful negotiated to stay together in “self-supporting” camps. The three camps in the Lillooet area – Minto, Bridge River and here in East Lillooet – were all in this category.
Despite inflammatory editorials in the local newspaper opposing their presence, in April of 1942, the first arrivals in East Lillooet constructed sixty-two tarpaper shacks that came to house over three hundred people while their former comfortable homes, possessions and properties were auctioned off.