Satsuki Ina
Writer, Filmmaker, and Therapist
“I was born ‘doing time’ in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison for Japanese Americans who protested their unjust incarceration. My father was separated from us; we lived under indefinite detention, charged with being a threat to national security. Mass incarceration of people of color has been a repeated ‘solution’ to perceived threats to the white power structure since the beginning of American history. My parents said ‘No! No!’ in 1943. Sadly, today I am compelled to join with others to once again say, ‘No! No!’ and demand that our government ‘Stop Repeating History!’"
Biography
Satsuki Ina was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at California State University, Sacramento, she has been researching the long-term impact of the incarceration trauma and its intergenerational impact.
A community activist, writer, and filmmaker, she has produced two award-winning documentary films about the World War II Japanese American incarceration. Children of the Camps was broadcast nationally on PBS from 1999 to 2003. In 2005, she produced a second documentary, From A Silk Cocoon, which was based on letters exchanged between her parents while held in separate prison camps during WWII. It was awarded a Northern California Emmy for Outstanding Cultural and Historical Programming. Dr. Ina has a private psychotherapy practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she serves as therapist and consultant for communities confronted with trauma related to clergy abuse, acculturation, racism, and captivity. With a specialization in cross-cultural counseling, she has conducted groups for Japanese Americans who, like herself, were children in the prison camps.
Photo Credits
Nicol Ragland
Toyo Miyatake Photograph Collection