BUILDING HISTORY 3.0
Building History 3.0 combines youth-powered research and creativity with Minecraft© to teach the history of Japanese American WWII incarceration camps.
What is Minecraft©? It's a popular online game that can best be described as electronic Lego blocks, which players use to build virtual worlds. When a young student, Gabriel Tajima-Pena, visited Heart Mountain near Powell, Wyoming, the concentration camp where his grandmother was incarcerated, he had a brainstorm. The result: a virtual recreation of the Heart Mountain camp on Minecraft. Gabriel's idea has grown into a comprehensive learning curriculum, Building History 3.0, developed by the UCLA Center for EthnoCommunications and Game Train Learning. With the support of the National Parks Service, California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, and UCLA Institute of American Cultures the website, videos and curriculum are available to schools, communities and homes throughout the U.S.
Nikkei Democracy Project
The Nikkei Democracy Project (NDP) is a multi-media collective that uses video, art, and social media to capture the power of the Japanese American imprisonment story and expose current threats to the Constitutional rights of targeted Americans. We are a group comprised of filmmakers, writers, scholars, and online media professionals committed to ensuring that we never forget the lessons of Executive Order 9066.
The Nikkei Democracy Project has produced content that ranges from two-minute, text-based, rapid-response videos to short documentaries, all geared toward providing a historical, cross-racial analysis of urgent issues. We have worked in partnership with such organizations as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, #VigilantLOVE and the UCLA Center for EthnoCommunications. NDP videos have been distributed through social media and journalism platforms such as Los Angeles Times “Frameworks.”
Collective members are: Joan Shikegawa (former acting chair of the NEA), Renee Tajima Peña (Oscar-nominated filmmaker), filmmakers Tani Ikeda (Emmy Award winning filmmaker) and Tad Nakamura (Gotham Award winning filmmaker), Sean Miura (social media marketing strategist), Karen Ishizuka (cofounder Japanese American National Museum Media Center) and Mariko Silver (president, Bennington College).
Videos in this project include:
Pilgrimage Remix
Immigration Ban LAX Protest
Happy Birthday Yuri Kochiyama
Leah’s Story
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The First People Arrested After the Pearl Harbor Attack Were…
