Poet, teacher, and social critic Roy Miki has done Canadian history a remarkable service with his poignant, insightful, and brutally honest recounting of the century-long struggle for Japanese-Canadian citizenship rights. Miki approaches the story of redress for a community that was forcefully uprooted, interned, and dispersed during and after the Second World War with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s microscope for detail, and the type of political savvy that gives shivers to those in power.

Born on a Manitoba farm six months after his family had been expelled from B.C., Miki mixes his personal story with that of a Japanese-Canadian community that had fought against severe restrictions on its liberties long before their shameful internment. Indeed, from denial of voting rights (until 1949) and zero access to a wide range of professions to riots, boycotts, and “Yellow Peril” fever, Miki makes it clear that internment was based not on national security fears, but on racism.

Miki’s history captures the intense subtleties, political differences, and complicated emotions of the internment period, much of which came to the surface years later during the campaign for just redress. He is fascinated with the process by which a traumatized community risks reopening old wounds to seek that redress, and his insider’s take on the campaign is a lesson in political reconciliation and healing. His analysis of how liberal politicians have transformed the notion of forced relocation into “evacuation” for the community’s own good is invaluable.

While pleased about the eventual compensation package, Miki refuses to gratefully sugarcoat the history, instead naming those who obstructed, insulted, and otherwise sought to keep the crimes under the carpet. He also reminds us that the seizure and liquidation of the assets of Japanese Canadians to pay for their own internment, the breaking up of families, and postwar community dispersal from B.C. were hallmarks of a governmental policy even more severe than that in the U.S.

Redress is a rare work of history, a page-turner that constantly pleases with fresh insights, moves the reader with its humanity, and provides provocative challenges to the easy way in which language is used to downplay past injustices. It’s also a warning that Canada as a nation remains vulnerable to the type of stereotyping and racial targetting that gave rise to one of the bleakest events in the nation’s history.