Sumi Harada is the youngest daughter of Jukichi Harada, famously named in the lawsuit that allowed her family to maintain ownership of their home in Riverside during an era when the Japanese could not legally own homes due to California’s anti-Japanese laws, the Alien Land Law of 1913. In the latter half of her life, Sumi is best known for her leadership and collaboration with the Japanese American community and its members. This project delves into how discovering Sumi’s poetry and rereading Sumi’s interviews demonstrates how one’s identities shift and change over the course of a lifetime through what I determine as prongs of domination where social, transnational, political, and familial institutions influence one’s acts and thoughts. Sumi lived in an era where there were fluctuations in the racial mores against Japanese Americans, especially during WWII, when Japanese Americans were seen as enemy aliens. I incorporate critical methodological approaches and apply contemporary theories in Asian American studies and literature to read against the grain to unpack how we shifted our view of Japanese American life through Sumi’s work. The complexities within Sumi’s poetry, writings, and interviews highlight how the historical archive can also be utilized to shift the Japanese American historical discourse.