How I Chose My Topic:
I started by thinking over summer break. One night, I thought of the story of the Aboriginal children of Australia, which I had learned about when I was there. The children were once forced to go to white schools and prosecuted for doing things traditional in their culture. I then thought about the movie Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, in which Aboriginal children followed a fence back to their families. I realized I could do a topic about the unfairness of this system and how it broke barriers of treaties between the Aboriginals and the Europeans. When I got to school, ready to research, my teacher told me that the same type of thing had happened here in the States. Once I had researched my project for a couple weeks, I realized I was not very interested in it. It was then that I remembered the tragedy of Japanese-American Internment, which my family had witnessed as my great-grandmother, who had lived in California, was friends with a Japanese family at the time. I was not able to interview her as she died a few years back, but when I approached my teacher about switching, she mentioned a man named Fred Korematsu who had taken a case about it to the Supreme Court. I realized this sounded interesting to me, and got to work.
How I Researched My Topic:
I started by looking online, but I found mostly things about the relation of Fred Korematsu's case to what is happening today with immigrants. Then I went to the State Historical Society and found some books about the Internment in general, where I learned more about the awful conditions they lived in. Then I checked out some books from the library about Fred Korematsu. To obtain primary sources, I looked at the Library of Congress website, where I took a lot of screenshots of newpaper articles from the camps, and I also borrowed a book that had the words of Executive Order 9066. Finally, I looked on a website about Fred Korematsu partially written by his daughter.
How I Chose My Category:
I had wanted to do either a documentary or a website because I thought it would be fun, or a paper because I like writing. By the time I decided on my topic, we were far enough along that I did not have timto get enough footage for a documentary, and a paper would be very hard and long. I tried to start the website and decided I liked it enough to do it.
How My Topic Relates to the Theme:
The story of Fred Korematsu relates to the theme Breaking Barriers because Fred was one of only a few Japanese Americans who actually fought against the Internment, and he also broke a barrier by winning his court case and getting an apology from the government for how they treated the Japanese Americans despite the opposition and lies stacked against him.