ACAM Dialogues Mini-Episode: An Interview with Laura Ishiguro (Hosted by Isa You, feat. Dr. Laura Ishiguro)
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ISA: The Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program would like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional, unceded, ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We hope that as we continue to facilitate these conversations about Asian diasporic communities, we also engage in critical dialogue about what it means to be uninvited guests and settlers on these lands.
Welcome to the fourth mini episode of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies (ACAM) podcast — a series of short interviews where we sit down with members of the ACAM community and learn about the community initiatives and projects they have been working on. My name is Isa You. I’m the Multimedia Production Assistant at ACAM and I’ll be your host for this episode. We hope that this interview series can be a way to continue building connections between ACAM students, staff, faculty and community partners, while also providing our community members with a platform to share similar work they’ve been doing in their community during this time.
My guest for this episode is Laura Ishiguro, historian and associate professor in the Department of History at UBC. We sat down last week in the ACAM office to chat “the everyday” & “the local”, being a history sleuth, and tips & tricks when it comes to research. Let’s take a listen.
ISA: Do you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?
LAURA: Of course. So my name is Laura Ishiguro and I’m a faculty member in the department of history here at UBC.
ISA: And as the Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies program, we’re always interested in hearing about people’s own experiences of migration. Could you tell us a bit more about your, and your family’s migration story?
LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. So in my case, I was born and raised on Southern Vancouver Island in the territory of W̱SÁNEĆ and lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people. And so the Migration Stories in my family are multi generational, and inherited in my case. So I’m the third generation born outside of home places on both sides of my family.
On my mother’s side, I trace descent, mostly to England and Scotland, and the family stories of migration I know on that side, were multiple generations of movement around places claimed by the British Empire, often moving out to sites of empire and then back to England and Scotland again. And arriving first in Canada in the early 20th century, in the territory, this hill, in the Okanagan, in British Columbia. On my father’s side, I trace descent to Japan. And again, that was stories of my great grandparents leaving Japan. And those are stories that are both extraordinary and kind of typical in the larger sense.
All four of my great grandparents moved first to Hawaii, settling on Kauai, territory of the Kanaka Maoli. And those are stories about sugarcane work on plantations and sharecropping arrangements. Those are stories about pineapple farming, and then eventually commercial fishing in the Pacific. And it was my father who left Hawaii and moved first to the mainland US. And one of the things I love about my family migration stories is that, you know, there are these global stories of movement on both sides. They’re stories about empire and colonialism and colonial occupation of Indigenous territories, and they’re stories about people moving on well trodden paths from Japan and from Britain, elsewhere. But for me, it’s also a really hyperlocal story. And so the ways that these strands braid together into one family that brought me to southern Vancouver Island, is a story about not just Vancouver, but UBC.
And so and to be entirely honest, it’s a story about the building we’re in right now. So my father was in the mainland US, he moved to Vancouver, in the 1970s, to work at UBC. And my mother’s parents both worked at UBC, my grandfather was a professor in the Math department. So this is also a story about academic privilege. And it was I’m pretty sure in the building that we’re in now that my parents met. And so for me, I think a lot about my migration stories as these global stories and these global stories about empire and colonialism, immigration, but also about the ways that those transnational and Imperial histories are always returning to this particular territory. Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory, and Point Grey in particular, and the ways that I have come back to here as well as a really, yeah, local and transnational migration story.
ISA: That is so interesting and such a lovely coincidence. I’m curious, in what ways do you think that history has influenced your research work?
LAURA: Yeah, in so many ways, I think in the big sense, you know, all of my research is really about that global and the local, and the ways in which people’s movements and these colonial systems are lived through family lives, and through this making of the particular place that I call home here. And it’s also, for me, really grappling with what it means to be a settler here, what it means to be at home here and to have my family made here. And what my responsibilities in relations are as a settler on stolen land that also is so rooted here. And then in a really obvious sense, and you know, my first, my first book, my PhD work focused on stories about people, like my mother’s family, and my own family with roots in Britain, coming to British Columbia and settling and claiming homes here.
And then my more recent work is focusing on people more like my father’s family, my family, people of Japanese descent, here in northwestern North America and grappling with what it means to be Japanese Nikkei here, what it means to be a Japanese Canadian historian for me, and also what it means to be Japanese Canadian with a family story that isn’t a story about internment in Canada. And also, you know, is a story about coming here, my father coming here in the 70s, but not as part of the Shin-Nisei, a new generation of migration from Japan, but a story that doesn’t really fit any of those narratives. And so, for me, all of my questions are really driven by my place and my family’s place here.
ISA: So I was digging around on your blog the other day in your bio. You said your research specializations include “British Columbia, Canada and British imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, settler colonialism, Nikkei history, gender, family society and the everyday. So I’m curious what you mean by the everyday here?”
LAURA: Yeah, thank you for that. What I’m really interested in, to be honest, is the ways that so called ordinary people like me, or you dare I say, I’m sure we’re extraordinary. But the ways that we live our lives in these kind of unremarkable daily stories about feelings and what we take for granted around us, and you know, history, sometimes we think about history as the most powerful people, and the most powerful people doing things that seem really important in the world. And I think all of us make history and reflect history. And so yeah, I’m interested in what gets taken for granted and what we eat, and how we live in relation to each other and how we feel about it.
ISA: And how might the everyday have importance also in a larger context?
LAURA: Yeah, for me, the everyday, is a reflection of how we see the world. And it’s a reflection of our material impact in relationships in the world. And it’s also a kind of power. And so, you know, politicians, or other people who have certain kinds of formal power, they make decisions that do matter in our lives. But in the end, what makes us angry and what we do with that anger, or what we take for granted as food that we can access or can’t access, that, for me, has this really real lived power for all of us. And I want to see that. I don’t want to just take it for granted.
ISA: And how might that relate to local history?
LAURA: Yeah, for me, this is also one of the ways that local history really matters. Like the things that matter here aren’t always things that register elsewhere on a larger scale. But they’re really about how you and I move through the world. Like, of course, large economic structures, or laws or policies absolutely, profoundly shape our lives and the structures that we live in. But local history is really about how we live here in the everyday. And so for me this scale of digging really deep into our lives here. is the way that we all live history, if that makes sense?
ISA: Yeah, for sure. And I was thinking, maybe just for the benefit of our listeners, and also myself, how do we define local history in the first place?
LAURA: It’s a really big question. And it won’t surprise you to know that different historians would answer that differently. And so I guess I see it as being a flexible category. Broadly speaking, I define it as a history that’s focused on a locality. For some people that might be at the city or town level, historically, work in the field has been on a smaller scale. So the neighbourhood scale or the building or the street scale.
But for me, the thing that matters most is not the specific scale that we’re looking at. But the questions are really about the specificity of this place, and why it matters. And we shouldn’t look at any locality, whether we’re talking about a street or a town, as if it’s an isolation from everything else. But really, like, why is what’s happening here at UBC important, and what’s particular about that? And so, yeah, I kind of sidestepped the question in some ways, but I think it kind of depends, but for me, it’s really about getting fine grained to a specific local place, and investigating what’s particular about?
ISA: And you answered this a little bit, but I’m curious, how do the everyday in the local narratives contrast the more historically legitimised narratives, for example, like government, or institutional narratives?
LAURA: Yeah, you know, they sit in really complex tension. Sometimes what happens at a local level or in someone’s everyday life reflects those wider narratives, or what we know about them or what we guess. But one of the things that happens when you really get into a local history investigation, or you get into an individual person’s personal records, or a local newspaper, you can see that those wider narratives are things that we know from a larger scale that they’re present, but they get refracted or changed or challenged in different ways.
And so, you know, something that seems really important and international history just might not really matter to someone in their daily life. Or they might think differently about it. And for me, this is actually one of the things that’s really important here is that, you know, sometimes when people talk about history, they, particularly when we get into the recent debates about, you know, John A. Macdonald, for example. In some of those conflicts, one of the most common lines is that he was a man of his times. And you hear that a lot, that these really powerful people who mobilized formal political power to enact policies that did very real harm, genocidal policies, exclusionary policies or laws, and that there’s some reluctance in some corners to condemn that, because they’re seen as men of their times.
And for me, one of the things that local history or everyday history, or history of other actual people can do is it can remind us that there’s no such thing as that, that there are so many people who did not share those ideas. There’s never a singular idea of a time. And in an obvious sense, you know, Indigenous people didn’t agree with John A. Macdonald, and, you know, Chinese people who were being excluded by the head tax didn’t agree with John A. Macdonald. But we can also see when we look at, you know, individual people’s letters, that there was also just a much wider diversity of ideas and experiences that can’t be summed up in that just one person must reflect all of that.
ISA: And on that note about letters, I’m curious, are there specific archival materials or artefacts that you find yourself gravitating towards as you do research?
LAURA: Yeah, so many. So I am doing a lot of new research right now. And it’s pulling me in a number of different directions. One of the things I’m doing right now is spending quite a bit of time in the 1970s and 1980s, which is really exciting for me, I have rocketed ahead a century in my research. And I have been spending time with an archival collection that other ACAM folks know quite well, which is the digitised Pender Guy radio collective files through the city of Vancouver archives. And I have been spending delightful amount of times just listening to Pender Guy shows. And some of the material that’s been digitised by the City of Vancouver archives is also like raw audio that they recorded for their files.
And so I listened to, I think, maybe several hours of raw footage from an anti KKK rally in Vancouver. In, I think, the early 80s. And the radio programs and the other files there, I’m just so drawn to and part of it is novel for me, because most of my work has focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I don’t get to hear those people. So having audio files is amazing. But Pender Guy just blows my mind, you know, the conversations they were having. And the questions they were posing. And the issues they were really grappling with, for me in this radio form, is just so powerful and so important. And I’m just new to that material and just absolutely loving it.
ISA: And, like I’m not even in any way working in history, but I am like something of a historical nerd or history enthusiast. And a lot of times the process of researching feels a lot like treasure hunting for me. And so how would you describe that process for yourself?
LAURA: Yeah, I often describe it, like a detective novel, or a mystery. And part of that reflects, I feel like sometimes I don’t find the treasure. But it’s the same kind of thing about the hunt. And for me doing historical research, doing work in the archives is very much about starting with a problem. It’s not generally like a murder mystery, but starting with a problem. And then just going in and exploring and seeing what’s there. And it’s not straightforward, because clues don’t come with a label on them that says clue. And in the same way in the archive, a source never tells you if it’s important, or it never tells you if it’s treasure even. That’s really in the eye of the historian.
And so one of the things I love is just going into the archive with something that I think is the problem or the question. And they’re just reading or listening or looking at what’s there. And assessing which of those things counter as relevant clues and what they add up to. And often I don’t end up solving my original problem. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever ended up solving the thing I went into the archives to solve, but then you are sorting through all of this other evidence and deciding what fits together to tell a different kind of story or to answer a different problem.
And it’s work that’s — it needs patience, and curiosity, and just so much delight at finding what you didn’t expect. I think for me, if you do historical research, really having your heart set on the one thing that you think you’re going to find your hearts gonna get broken so many times. And so for me, the thing I love most about it is solving mysteries I didn’t expect to solve by being open to the unexpected.
ISA: What is your actual process of researching? Like, how does one go about doing that?
LAURA: Yeah, I have a particular process that I would describe perhaps as messy. And so different projects have looked different. But in general, my process is to design a question that I think based on what I know about the topic and the scholarship is relevant and significant. But to be honest, once I mean the archive, I’m distracted incredibly easily. And I’m really curious and I just love engaging with the historical evidence. And so honestly, my process is get distracted immediately, end up down rabbit holes I didn’t plan to be down and just read what’s there.
And then think about whether I found patterns. Whether I found things that surprised me based on what I know, and whether I found things that interested me. And if I can find something, that’s all three of that, something that’s surprising, always signals that it’s a place that I might be able to make a contribution. I might have found something that we didn’t know yet, or we didn’t expect. Patterns mean, it’s something that was important in some way. And then something that’s interesting is just way more fun to work with. And so honestly, that’s my process is just get distracted, find a pattern and see if that’s the thing that’s worth exploring.
ISA: And aren’t historians in many ways, also storytellers, like as the material requires interpretation.
LAURA: Yes, absolutely. And I think this is really key, actually, to the work. I remember really clearly during my PhD, I had this moment. I mean, there were many moments like this, I was so frustrated, and I was so upset, and I was being really hard on myself, because I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had done all this research, and I just couldn’t piece it together into something. And my PhD supervisor looked at me and she was like, what do you mean, you’re not working or getting somewhere? Like you’re thinking and thinking is work.
And that, I go back to that so many times. That blew my mind. And yeah, we’re storytellers. And that’s not easy. There is not a straight line from the sources you find to the story you’re telling. But it does—it takes this thinking and this piecing, and figuring out what the story really is, and then figuring out how to tell it, because it’s not just what we find. But crucially, it’s how we tell it and interpret it that makes such a profound difference. And that takes thinking about tone, and word choice as much as it does, figuring out which sources are relevant.
ISA: I see. And last question, do you have any tips and tricks for like the average history enthusiast or any places or resources you think might be under-utilised by people when doing research?
LAURA: Yeah, I have a few tips and tricks. So the number one rule of doing any historical research is to be nice to archivists, and they are brilliant, wonderful experts who know their collections, who know what’s up, really. And so, archivists are crucial. And it’s okay if you don’t know everything when you start. And I think I still get nervous every time I go to an archive I’ve never been to before, because I don’t know, I don’t know how it works. I don’t know the ropes. I know the general gist of things. So one of my tips and tricks is being honest archivists, and look at the archive website before you go and see what’s there and see if they have any information about visiting first. But other tips and tricks include:
There are an incredible, and always expanding number of digitised collections of historical sources. Some of them are hosted through libraries, university libraries, and public libraries. And some of them are hosted through specific archives or local historical societies. One of the tips is just that there’s actually no central listing of what those are. And so it’s good to ask around, it’s good to do some internet searching, and find out what’s out there. And it’s also really critical to remember that not all historical sources are digitised and online, sometimes you have to do in person research. And also there just aren’t historical sources on everything. And so sometimes you can really have your heart set on answering a certain question. It’s actually just something we can never know. In that historical sense.
I’m not sure I would describe this as underutilised. But actually, one of the things that I would really highlight is that UBC Library has a research guide for Asian Canadian history. And that includes some archival collections that relate to Asian Canadian history. And so it’s definitely not a total resource, it’s not the only place to look. But if you are interested in finding an introductory listing of some places you can look for Asian Canadian historical materials, I recommend always looking at the UBC Library Research Guides, and there is an Asian Canadian one there.
ISA: Yeah, thank you so much for coming here and answering all my questions. I really appreciate it.
LAURA: It’s been such a pleasure, thank you for having me.
ISA: You just heard an interview with Laura Ishiguro, historian and associate professor in the Department of History at UBC.
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you have an idea for a mini episode of the ACAM podcast, we’d love to hear from you. Send us your ideas by emailing us at acam.program@ubc.ca. We hope these mini episodes can provide a way to stay connected with the ACAM community while learning more about the community engagement and advocacy projects our community members and partner organisations are involved in. To be notified when the next podcast episode is released and to stay up to date on all things ACAM, please follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @UBCACAM and like us on Facebook at Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies UBC.
Learn more about the guests and their work:
Dr. Laura Ishiguro