Day of Remembrance--Japanese American WWII Internment

 

Japanese Americans travel between housing barracks with Heart Mountain on the horizon. Public Domain, Department of the Interior. War Relocation Authority.

Day of Remembrance

February 19, 2022, marked 80 years of racial reckoning since the signing of Executive Order 9066 that led to the wrongful incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. On that date in 1942, community leaders were imprisoned without arrest or trial. Families, the majority of them naturalized or US born citizens, were moved to relocation centers before final settlement in ten internment camps throughout the United States.

From November, 1942, until early 1945, Heart Mountain Internment Center housed approximately 10,000 people on a bleak high plain in Wyoming. That treeless plain suffers the extremes of weather--hot in the summer and buffeted by wind, snow and cold in winter.

When the camp was abandoned in 1945, it was the property of the U S government. Homesteading was encouraged and people filing for 125 acres of land could purchase two barracks building for $1 each.  Many of the buildings were moved and re-purposed as homes and outbuildings.

For further information about Heart Mountain, read the excellent article by Eric Sandeen, “The Japanese American Relocation Center at Heart Mountain and the Construction of the Post-World War II Landscape.” http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs8h0.17.

Winter 1948-49

In the fall of 1948 Cody, Wyoming, experienced a brief economic growth and a father found employment there. He moved his wife and daughters, 6 years-old and 22 months, to Cody but soon found that housing was scarce. In early December they found someone who allowed the family to inhabit one of two black, tar-papered buildings a few miles out of town.

There was no electricity or running water but there was a wood burning stove. The interior of the outside walls were rough planks with gaps that had to be chinked with wads of paper and rags. Then the family hung blankets to further insulate a portion of the building to make it livable.

The winter of 1948-49 was extremely cold with deep snow. The  rough home in which the family was living was up a hill, some distance from better traveled country roads. Many school mornings the father would have to break trail for his first grader daughter to get down the hill to the school bus stop.

The "boom" in Cody didn't last long and by early spring the father had to seek employment elsewhere. He was able to move his family to a different town.  

A few years later, his daughter found a picture of those black tar-papered buildings in a Wyoming History textbook. She learned that those buildings had been part of the Heart Mountain Japanese American Relocation Center.

I humbly tell you this story because I was that 6 year old girl. We made it through the winter; I even managed to have mumps during Christmas break without missing any school.

I don't tell you this to stir feelings of sympathy for me and my family. We always had hope, knowing we could leave those mean circumstances. 

I tell you this story to bring attention to the original purpose of those buildings and the thousands of people who lived in them for three years without the ability to walk away. As we think back to this dark chapter in American history and learn more about it, it gives us a needed context for our family history and our consideration of current events as well.

Further reading about Heart Mountain

Sandeen, Eric J. “The Japanese American Relocation Center at Heart Mountain and the Construction of the Post-World War II Landscape.” Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy, edited by Hans Bak et al., vol. 7, Brill, 2018, pp. 285–306, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs8h0.17.