CONFERENCE SESSION: Randall Okita: Sharing Stories: Past, Present, and Future

For our 24th Annual Borovoy Conference, Randall Okita talked to students about storytelling and how we can fill in the gaps of historical knowledge with imaginative exercises.

This approach allows the audience of a story to connect with the meaning behind what is being presented and learn the historical background behind different communities.

Storytelling can fill in the silences and questions we have about ancestors that are no longer here or that find it too hard to talk about past traumas. We can engage with the unknowns in our history as an act of imagination.

This storytelling engages the audience in learning and retelling the stories of what could have been. What would it have been like to live there? What would it have been like to travel at that time? What would have pushed someone to leave their country?

Randall’s book, The Book of Distance, follows the story of Randall’s grandfather as he traveled from Japan to Canada and suffered state-sanctioned racism during WW2. He was separated from his family and later learned his sister died during Hiroshima.

His grandfather would have traveled by boat, and Randall asked the high-school students virtually present at our Conference to imagine what it would be like to stand beside his grandfather, on a boat on the ocean, hoping to follow the dream of a better life.

Randall invited the students to participate in the story he was telling and to engage in the aspects we may not know about a story.

History books can condense facts into a single narrative, told from a specific perspective, but history and human experiences are complex, layered, diverse, and intertwined. Censorship, cultural erasure, genocide, war, and more can all distort which perspective is told and how.

How can the communities excluded from the narratives taught reclaim their histories & stories? How does retelling a story change it or how we see ourselves? How can we find new ways to look at the past? Does that help us find new possibilities for the future?

To learn more about The Book of Distance project: