03.28.2026 Minoru Yasui Day

What Would Min Do?

“What is done to the least of us can be done to all of us.”

Saturday, March 28, 2026 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Oregon Historical Society

1200 SW Park Ave, 97205

Free Event Online Or In Person

Please save the date for our
2026 Minoru Yasui Day.

The year 2026 marks two significant milestones: the 10th anniversary of Oregon’s designation in perpetuity of March 28 as Minoru Yasui Day, honoring the day Minoru Yasui courageously stood against unjust government orders and the legacy of Oregon’s only Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, rooted in the principle of no kings and the belief that power belongs to the people.

Together, we will honor these anniversaries and explore contested narratives in history, education, and politics — standing with the voices of the past and present as we recommit to preserving democracy, freedom, civil rights, civil liberties, and justice for all.

Free Admission to OHS: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to all exhibits, including “The Yasui Family: An American Story” in honor of Minoru's legacy and Oregon's Minoru Yasui Day.

Click here to register

Event Location & Parking Details

Oregon Historical Society

1200 SW Park Ave, Portland, OR 97205

Enter on SW Park Ave

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Parking

AirGarage

756 SW Jefferson St

Portland, OR 97201

City Center Parking - Ladd Tower Lot 93

756 SW Jefferson St

Portland, OR 97201

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For sponsorship opportunities click here.

Press Release & Media

Download the 2026 Minoru Yasui Day flyer here.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

WELCOME

Kerry Tymchuk, Boyle Family Executive Director, Oregon Historical Society

Remarks from Governor Kate Brown

Establishing Minoru Yasui Day

The History of the Minoru Yasui Legacy Project

Peggy Nagae, Co-Founder, Minoru Yasui Legacy Project

Reflections on Building a Legacy: MYLP Across the Decade

Emcee, Chani Hawkins, MYLP Executive Committee Vice-Chair, & Minoru Yasui's Granddaughter

Reflections on MYLP’s past and growing impact

2026 Minoru Yasui Student Contest Awardees

Emily Thackray, Minoru Yasui Student Contest Committee Chair

Elissa Dungess, Minoru Yasui Student Contest Committee Co-Chair, JAMO Director of Education & Engagement

Announcement of the 2026 Minoru Yasui Student Contest winners featuring artwork inspired by the 2026 theme: Upholding the Rule of Law: What does seeking justice for all look like?

Keynote & Panel Discussion:
Contested Narratives: History, Politics, & Community Action

Cherstin M. Lyon, Southern Oregon University Honors College Director and Professor

Panel Discussion

As we approach America's 250th anniversary, fights over who gets to tell our country's story have never been more important. Across the nation, politicians are banning books, changing school curriculums, and battling over how history is taught—and these changes affect whose stories get told and whose get left out. This panel looks at how current political movements are changing the way we teach and talk about immigration, race, and American identity, and discusses what educators, advocates, and community members can do to fight back and support immigrant communities. Join us to talk about keeping history truthful, making sure everyone's stories are included, and working together to honor the contributions immigrants have made to our shared history. The Minoru Yasui Legacy Project supports this important conversation in the spirit of Minoru Yasui himself—a Japanese American civil rights leader who fought against injustice and would surely oppose any attempts to erase or twist the stories of marginalized communities from the historical record.

Panelists

Eliza E. Canty-Jones, Chief Program Officer & Editor, Oregon Historical Quarterly
Kevin Hatfield, University of Oregon Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Research and Distinguished Scholarships, and Director of Academic Residential and Research Initiatives
Erica Naito-Campbell, Author
Frank So, Executive Director, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon

Special Performance: Poetry

Kurt Ikeda, Poet by Passion, and Director of Programs & Engagement, Go For Broke National Education Center

CLOSING REMARKS

Barbara Yasui, MYLP Education Committee Lead & retired educator

Megan Lallier-Barron, Curator of Exhibitions, Oregon Historical Society

3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Join Yasui family members and OHS Curator of Exhibitions Megan Lallier-Barron in OHS’s exhibition The Yasui Family: An American Story after the program.

Kerry Tymchuk serves as the Boyle Family Executive Director of the Oregon Historical Society (OHS). Born in Reedsport, Oregon, Kerry is a graduate of Willamette University and Willamette University College of Law. Prior to assuming the helm at OHS in April 2011, Kerry earned a reputation as one of Oregon’s most respected public servants. His career included service as a Marion County Deputy District Attorney, Director of Speechwriting to U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, Director of Speechwriting and Legal Counsel to U.S. Senator Bob Dole, and Oregon Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Gordon Smith. Kerry co-authored four books with the Doles as well as worked with Oregon business icons Gert Boyle, Harry Merlo, Al Reser, and Ken Austin in writing their autobiographies. A four-time champion on the popular television game show “Jeopardy,” Kerry is active in the community, recognized by Oregon Business Industry in 2018 as “Oregon Statesman of the Year.” Kerry and his wife, Becky, reside in Beaverton, and are the parents of two children.

Kate Brown is President of Willamette Falls Trust and served as the 38th Governor of Oregon from 2015 to 2023. Her career in public service spans more than 30 years and includes six years as Oregon Secretary of State, three terms in the Oregon Senate, and two terms in the Oregon House of Representatives.

She was honored and humbled to have been selected as Willamette Falls President. Kate believes the Willamette Falls Inter-Tribal Public Access Project is our collective opportunity to both restore the land and waterways and to reconnect our communities. It’s extremely important to her to be a part of work dedicated to repairing historic wrongs and recognizing the damages of colonization.

Kate moved to Oregon from her native Minnesota to attend Lewis & Clark’s Northwestern School of Law. She earned her degree and fell in love with Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Kate is an avid kayaker who wants Willamette Falls to be known far and wide as the eighth wonder of Oregon.

Peggy Nagae, a third generation Japanese American (Sansei), grew up on a farm in Boring, Oregon. Her family’s incarceration during World War II, childhood poverty, and growing up in a white, working-class community as well as her “coming of age” in the 1960s with the anti-Vietnam War movement, the feminist movement, and the Asian American student movement have informed much of her work. Nagae graduated, cum laude, in East Asian studies with departmental honors and distinction on her thesis from Vassar College. She earned a J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School, with honors, and a M.A. in spiritual psychology from the University of Santa Monica. Her many accomplishments include serving on the JACL National Redress Committee, which formulated the congressional legislation for reparations and passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and serving as the lead attorney for Minoru Yasui in reopening his World War II Supreme Court case (along with Korematsu v. United States and Hirabayashi v. United States) and successfully overturning his conviction. In 2013, as co-founder with Holly Yasui of the Minoru Yasui Tribute Committee (now the Minoru Yasui Legacy Project), Nagae spearheaded Yasui’s successful nomination for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which President Obama awarded him, posthumously, in November of 2015. In 2025, she was recognized by the National Association of Women Lawyers as an Impact Leader and by the Oregon Commission for Women with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Keynote & Panel Moderator

Cherstin M. Lyon is a professor of history at Southern Oregon University and is a native Oregonian. She received her BA and MA in History from the University of Oregon, and her PhD in history from the University of Arizona. Her expertise is in Asian American history, immigration and citizenship law, and public and oral history. She is author of several books and articles, and has led many digital history projects.

Cherstin’s most relevant publication to this event is her first book, Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory (Temple University Press). The book centers on the WWII wartime resistance of Gordon Hirabayashi—who, like Minoru Yasui, challenged the unconstitutional policies of exclusion and incarceration all the way to the Supreme Court—as well as the men who resisted the draft from inside two incarceration camps, Topaz (Utah) and Amache (Colorado), in protest of their incarceration as "suspect" citizens alongside racially segregated combat units. For some, it was a gut level response to the violation of their rights as citizens, while others justly sought, like Yasui and Hirabayashi, to turn their resistance into test cases. Cherstin is currently working on a journal article about Min Yasui and his wartime resistance.

Panelists

Eliza E. Canty-Jones is the Chief Program Officer & Editor, Oregon Historical Quarterly, at the Oregon Historical Society. Eliza collaborates with people from across cultures, generations, and knowledge backgrounds to create publications and programs that elevate marginalized voices and advance complex perspectives. She began to value history while interviewing Vernon Thompson, a local waterman and St. George Islander, when she was a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she became founding co-editor of SlackWater: Oral Folk History of Southern Maryland. She is editor of the Oregon Historical Quarterly and chief program officer at the Oregon Historical Society. Canty-Jones was co-founder and served as president of the Oregon Women’s History Consortium, which created the project “Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote, 1912–2012.”

Kevin Hatfield is the Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Research and Distinguished Scholarships at the University of Oregon. He leads a network of programs empowering students to navigate the hidden curriculum and structural barriers that have disproportionately impacted traditionally underserved students in higher education with accessing and engaging the full benefits of the public research university. Kevin is a “triple duck” with a BA and PhD in History from the UO and MA in History from Utah State University. He has served as affiliated faculty with the Department of History and Robert D. Clark Honors College since 2003. His scholarship and teaching focus on the intersecting history of race, ethnicity, immigration, and public land and water law in the Pacific Northwest. His community-centered research has engaged with the Bizkaian Basque communities of the Northern Great Basin, as well as the Northern Paiute communities of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Burns Paiute Tribe through the “Decolonizing Research: The Northern Paiute History Project” co-developed with UO Professor Jennifer O’Neal.

Erica Naito-Campbell was born in Portland and grew up next door to her Grandma and Grandpa Naito, who instilled in her progressive values of social justice, equality, and a profound connection with nature. Recently she has worked on Oregon Rises Above Hate, an annual event highlighting Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander issues and community. Her first book, Portland’s Audacious Champion: How Bill Naito Overcame Anti-Japanese Hate and Became an Intrepid Civic Leader, was published by Oregon State University Press in 2024.

Frank So is the Executive Director of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and comes directly from the Office of the Vice President at the White House. As a Vice-Presidential Associate, he frequently traveled with the Vice President, advising her office on trips outside the continental United States. He previously worked for President Obama as a Presidential Associate, where he traveled in advance of the President to help ensure effective state functions on the ground.

For over a decade, Frank served as a U.S. diplomat in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Northern and East Africa. Most recently, he was the Senior Mission Advisor with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Colombia and Senior Human Rights Advisor for USAID in Honduras.

Before working with the government, Frank served with the United Nations in Darfur, Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan. His last post with the U.N. was as the Darfur Officer in Charge for the International Organization of Migration. Read more >

Kurt Ikeda is the Director of Programs and Engagement at Go For Broke National Education Center in Little Tokyo. Hawaii-born and raised in the South Bay of Los Angeles, Kurt Ikeda (B.A. UCLA ’13, M. Ed. Loyola Marymount ’15) is a second generation Japanese American educator by profession and poet by passion. He draws inspiration from the courage and compassion of his Nikkei ancestors who were incarcerated at Santa Anita, Poston, and Crystal City. He previously served as the Chief of Interpretation for the National Park Service at Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho and Education Manager at Japanese American Museum of Oregon. He now resides in Pasadena with his beloved wife, April, and baby daughter, May.

Special thanks to our hosting sponsor, The Oregon Historical Soceity.

Presented by the Minoru Yasui Legacy Project in collaboration with the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, this event honors Min’s lifelong fight for equity.