A closer view of interpretive panels in the Burns building windows. Photo: Marsh Garrick Rice
by Margaret Tessman
In the summer of 2025, the Sandon Historical Society unveiled “Windows to the Past,” a permanent display of four interpretive panels that hang in the front windows of the replica Burns building in the Sandon town site. Funded by a grant from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society through the B.C. Heritage Sites program, the panels feature historic photos, illustrations, quotes and interpretive text that share the stories and experiences of the 950 Japanese Canadians who were interned in Sandon during the Second World War. The site was chosen so that the panels will be accessible year-round, even when the Sandon Museum and private businesses are closed.
The project team members were New Denver local Amanda Murphy (project manager), Carolyn Nakagawa (researcher/writer) and Danielle Harumi Jette (designer) from Vancouver. Danielle’s uncles were born in Sandon during the internment so for her it is a personal story. Sandon Historical Society director Marsh Garrick Rice took over as manager at the end of 2024.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 a total of 22,000 men, women and children of Japanese heritage were ordered to leave a 100-mile protected zone on the B.C. coast and, taking only what they could carry, were sent to road camps and internment camps in the Interior and to sugar beet farms in the prairies. Property, homes, businesses, vehicles and boats were confiscated and later sold at bargain prices. The Japanese community was effectively broken apart, either exiled to Japan after the war or scattered across the country. In the Kootenay Boundary region, internment camps were built in New Denver, Lemon Creek, the village of Slocan, Kaslo, Christina Lake and Greenwood.
Two of the interpretive panels in the front windows of the Burns building next to the Sandon Museum. Photo: Marsh Garrick Rice
Susanne Tabata is the CEO of the Japanese Canadian Legacy Society. She writes on the JCLS website that, “For Japanese Canadians, it is important to our community and to our collective healing that we preserve these stories and acknowledge the places that, prior to uprooting, the Japanese Canadian community called home—the places where we flourished and raised our families and built our businesses, and the places where we experienced and overcame adversity.”
Garrick Rice says that it was decided even before he joined the project that the exhibit would as much as possible tell the story of the internment from the perspective of those who had been interned and in their own voices. There was also an effort made to find photos taken by internees themselves that helped to tell the story of Sandon’s two-year internment period from the perspective of those who lived it. One anecdote serves to illustrate the success of this approach.
Sandon is one of the stops on Tomoshibi, a weeklong bus tour of internment sites that the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby has organized for more than 20 years. The tour guests this past summer included Kaslo internment survivor Jim Miyazaki and his family. In an interview published in the September 2025 issue of Fraser Monthly magazine, Garrick Rice says, “Upon first viewing the exhibit, Jim immediately recognized the name of his elementary school teacher and told those of us in the vicinity that she was his teacher. That was the first time I witnessed a former internee discover a personal connection to their past through our exhibit, and it was very moving.”
The Sandon Museum and other replica buildings are open to visitors between the May long weekend and Thanksgiving. The town site is accessible all year, as there are permanent residents who still call the village home. Once known as the Heart of the Silvery Slocan, Sandon was once a booming mining town boasting a population of 5,000. When Carpenter Creek flooded in 1955, most of the original buildings were destroyed.
sandoninthekootenays.ca, sandonmuseum.ca
