The Music She Carried
A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.
The Nest That Holds The Story
Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.
What A Story Costs
Story is not free. A reflection on the Migration Literary Award, what it revealed, and the road to The Tapestry.
The Gallery’s Standing Invitation to Visual Artists
Sabrina Aureli stood at the edge of the frame—a balcony, a moon, a sea—and called it Beckoning. That image opened the Gallery of Human Migration’s first featured visual artist collaboration. Then Andrew Duff arrived, with his eye for the honest, uncomfortable, sometimes funny weight of being human together. Two artists, two cycles, one continuous thread. The Gallery’s invitation to visual artists is standing and permanent: bring work that listens, in any medium, for any movement. We are always looking for the next voice.
Becoming Is Not Passive. It Is an Ethical Act.
She packed what she could carry, said goodbye to people she didn’t know how to leave, and moved. No photograph at the border. No policy paper written in her name. This March, the Gallery of Human Migration brings together artists, filmmakers, and writers—Sabrina Aureli, Sunny Yi, Leena Minifie, David Paperny, Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann, and Keiko Honda—to ask what transformation actually costs. Becoming, they suggest, is not personal growth. It is an ethical act.
A Mirror, Not a Memorial
In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.
March 21, and “The Italian Question” documentary
Fear, belonging, and the stories we claim—or don’t. A conversation with filmmaker Sun-Kyung Yi on the migration history hiding in plain sight.
The Nail That Sticks Out: Migration, Memory, and Becoming
In March, the Gallery pauses to reflect on two intertwined truths: that women have long been the stewards of cultural survival, and that the struggle for human rights is inseparable from the histories of migration, displacement, and resilience.
The Red Box That Travels Like Humanity Itself
Everywhere, people move—each carrying an invisible red box filled with their past, their dreams, and their hopes.
When you see them together, you see us all—one human constellation, bound by movement and memory.
A Return Long Overdue: The Vatican, Indigenous Artifacts, and the Politics of Repatriation
The Gallery of Human Migration celebrates the Vatican’s decision to return sacred Indigenous artifacts to their original communities—a long-awaited act of justice. Though not directly involved in this process, the Gallery has long advocated for such restitution. We celebrate this moment with conviction and gratitude, as witnesses who have long hoped to see institutions embrace genuine acts of restoration and reconciliation.