The 2025 Watada Lecture: Satsuki Ina

Resistance, Resilience, and Solidarity

This evening gathering draws on community voices and collective action. How do we carry forward the lessons of Japanese American incarceration into the struggles of today? How do communities transform trauma into resilience, and resilience into solidarity?

The program will feature Dr. Satsuki Ina, co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots movement that draws on the memory of incarceration to stand against immigrant detention and racial injustice. She will be joined by speakers from Hawaiʻi’s local communities who are organizing, healing, and imagining new futures of justice and belonging: Salmah Rizvi (ACLU Hawai'i) and Monisha Das Gupta (Ethnic Studies, UH Mānoa).

Watada Lectures

The Umematsu and Yasu Watada Lectures on Peace, Social Justice and the Environment are held biennially with support from the Watada Lectures Fund, established by Kathy Watada Wurfel and David Wurfel. The public is invited to attend the 2025 lectures at Church of the Crossroads.

Biography

Born at Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II, Satsuki Ina is a professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento and a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She has produced two documentaries about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans—Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon—and she is the founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a direct action project working to end immigration detention. She is the author of The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest.

Sponsors and Supporters

• Richardson School of Law, UH Mānoa
• Better Tomorrow Speaker Series, University of Hawai’i
• Davis Democracy Initiative, Punahou School
• Hawai'i People's Fund
• Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, UH Mānoa
• Department of Ethnic Studies, UH Mānoa
• Center for Oral History, UH Mānoa
• Hawai’i Coalition for Immigrant Rights
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Hawai’i
• Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Honolulu Chapter

Notes

*Parking is free. Doors open at 5:00pm with a pre-event reception with light fare provided. The talk will begin at 6:00 pm. As part of our sustainable efforts, we encourage carpooling and kindly ask attendees to bring their own utensils.