Scholarship surrounding the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians (Nikkei) during the Second World War has largely focused on the wartime incarceration and the events that led to the Redress Movement. Minimal research has explored the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian communities in the aftermath of the Redress Movement. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, the North American Nikkei communities' heightened interest in preserving the histories of their dispossession and internment contributed to the opening of survivor-founded museums in both Canada and the United States. As the survivors of the incarceration - who have also long served as founding leadership of these institutions – are now passing on, this forces the ascent of a new generation of museum professionals, who must reflect on the museums' relevance in today's society and articulate a new institutional identity and at the same time, a community's identity. This paper addresses this unprecedented challenge. Museums serve as rich forums for examining how communities transmit the past to shore up a sense of shared identity that has relevance in contemporary contexts. While museum scholars have explored the challenges of the multidimensional nature of group representation within ethnic or identity-driven museums, this paper pays particular attention to the production and dissemination of collective identity and cultural memories at community founded museums. It discusses the communicative interactions and internal structures that enable institutions to articulate both group identity and memory. Unique also to this particular Japanese-American context is that the community has experienced a type of reparations settlement or form of "working through of the past," over twenty years ago. Present-day museum staff and docents were interviewed and asked to reflect on the ways in which their identity may influence their professional practice, how they negotiate narratives of the past with present-day approaches, and, what still remains unresolved or unreconciled within the Japanese American National Museum following the Redress Movement. The museum staff's personal convictions, their understanding of their role in their community, and a personal alignment with the institutional mission played a central role in their pro-active engagement with a "remaking" of the past and thereby re-shaping the collective or group identity. Implications for further research are explored.
