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LG: So currently, you said that you were on the board for Seabrook working on education. I'm curious, obviously, education and awareness is pretty important to you, so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your current work and what that means in connection to your own story?

MN: Yeah. Well, I'm the president of the board of the Seabrook Education and Cultural Center, which was established in 1994. And it was set up to commemorate the history of the community, which, you know, the initial focus was on the relocation there of Japanese Americans, and then also the Estonian and then other refugees from the Baltic countries who settled later. I think the perspective there is to see what that process was, I mean, who was involved, what kind of interactions there were. And in a broader sense, I mean, what does that all mean? What does that say? And we're also, I think, very much engaged and trying to broaden out the community, the sense of the community itself. Because, I think many people who were involved in establishing the center focused very much on the, you know, the Estonians and the Japanese Americans, particularly, but not the African Americans. And then there were other groups that settled in the area. There were, besides African Americans, there were Jamaican contract workers whose families stayed, there were Appalachian whites. And I'm not, I don't think that those stories have yet been fully told or in the interactions. And of course, we live in an area, a region, which was very conservative, and we had been very white, though the immediate area was not. So that's obviously another part of this story. I tend to be more skeptical than some about, you this ever less rosy view, let's put it that way, of this country in terms of being a land of opportunity, but I can certainly speak to other great and positive contradictions involved in that experience. And that has to be told, too.

LG: I see here, I think you've kind of covered all of the questions that we had. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we didn't ask you or anything you think we're missing or anything?

MN: I must admit, I can't think of any at the moment, truth be told. [Laughs] I think it is important to have a sense, I mean, to have a greater sort of view of popular history. I mean, it's clear from reading, just over the years, what's going on in this country, that a lot of what's... there's a lot that's just unknown, and there's also much that's known that's just not true. I mean, some of that's, I'm not saying that there's a single truth, but I am saying that I think there are interpretations, which seem to be inadequate in explaining and understanding events and people. I mean, you know, all the struggles around what's woke and what CRT is, and, you know, what's the American experience. I think that's very much up for grabs in terms of, you know, what we know, and how much we know. So we're all part of that particular struggle, I think.

LG: So do you see yourself continuing this activism for a while?

MN: Well, yeah, I mean, within limits. I'm getting a little old for this, you know, but I do a lot of this stuff, you know, it's interviews and discussions, and I enjoy it. My capacity for hitting the streets is not as great as it used to be, I must admit. But I also think about the importance of writing down things that relate to just my own experiences. I mean, I've begun, I hope, I'm going to continue this for a while, to explore some of the files, for example, of the Friends Service Committee, pretty comprehensive archives downtown and look at some of the some of the stuff I wrote. And the stuff that was written about things that were going on in some very turbulent periods. So I would like to see myself in that sense as a kind of historian. But then I think, you know, probably many of us are really, without getting paid for it, or being explicitly listed as our occupation.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.