Nikki Nojima Louis, a Japanese American, will present a talk entitled, From Days of Infamy to Days of Remembrance: One Woman’s Journey, on Saturday, April 8 from 12pm to 1pm, in the Branigan Cultural Center. Dr. Louis invites you to inhabit the lives and times of the generation of Japanese Americans who grew up under the cloud of what a congressional investigation committee in 1983 called “race prejudice and war hysteria.” The talk will be in conjunction with Issei and Beyond: The Nakayama Family’s Journey in the Mesilla Valley on display at the Branigan Cultural Center through May 13, 2017.
Nikki Nojima Louis is a Japanese American writer who was born in Seattle, incarcerated during WWII in an Idaho prison camp, and grew up in Chicago, where she was the only non-white member of several professional dance companies. In the Pacific Northwest, she was education director of the Group Theatre’s National Multicultural Playwrights Festival and a member of the Seattle/Soviet Theater Exchange where, in 1989, she spent 5 weeks working with Russian and Muslim theater companies in Uzbekistan. Her oral history play on Japanese Americans, “Breaking the Silence”, has been performed throughout the United States and was performed in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2013. She has taught Creative Writing and Asian American Literature at UNM, hosted Hiroshima bomb survivors for a forum, “From Hiroshima to Hope,” and created “Inhabiting History” programs that have toured New Mexico and other states.
Admission to the Branigan Cultural Center is free. The museum is located at 501 North Main Street and is open Tuesday – Friday from 10am to 4:30pm, and Saturday from 9am to 4:30pm. For additional information, visit the website at: museums.las-cruces.org or call 575.541.2154.
If you need an accommodation to enable you to fully participate in this event, please contact the museum 48 hours prior to the event.