It has been a busy year for the Japanese American National Museum since our participation last year in the “Power of Place—Sites of Conscience” dialog. This year, 2008, marks the 20th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided for an official government apology and reparations for thousands of Japanese Americans who were unconstitutionally removed by the U.S. government from their homes on the West Coast and parts of Hawai`i during World War II. To commemorate this important occasion, the museum presented a series of programs  These programs—which have include film screenings, panels and symposia, and displays—have addressed such topics as the role of grass-roots activism in achieving redress, the role of women in the redress movement, and the connection of Japanese American redress to other American reparation movements. The next program in the series is coming up on Saturday, October 25, 2008, and it will explore the WWII rendition of Japanese Latin Americans. http://www.janm.org/events/2008/redress/programs/ 

The museum also presented a major national conference in Denver over July 4th weekend. Titled “Whose America? Who’s American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice,” the conference brought together scholars and educators, students, multi-generational families, and community members to examine the connections between the Japanese American World War II experience and the historical and contemporary issues surrounding democracy and civil rights. By focusing on the significance of particular places to individual and community history and memory, many of the discussions and events—including a visit to the site of Amache concentration camp—had direct pertinence to the New Tactics discussion “Power of Place” from last year.

http://www.janm.org/projects/ec/conference/

This URL will take you to a page rich with resources from the conference. It includes links to articles written by conference participants; a slide show of conference highlights; participant comments and stories; photo essays; and audio files of selected panel presentations. Among the features that are of particular relevance to the “Power of Place” dialog:

http://www.discovernikkei.org/nikkeialbum/en/node/1018

A photo album and family history created by Mitch Homma, documenting the entire WWII experience from the FBI arrest of family members to their eventual incarceration at Amache camp in Colorado.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/forum/en/node/2514

“CSI: Amache”—an essay by Gary T. Ono about his experiences participating, with his grandson, in a 2008 archeological dig at Amache, where he had been incarcerated as a child.

http://www.janm.org/django/projects/ec/conference/events/54/

Audio of panel presentation “Reconciling a Contested Past: The Santa Fe Interment Camp Marker,” which involved different perspectives on the hotly debated decision of the City of Santa Fe to place a commemorative marker at the location of a WWII Dept. of Justice camp.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/forum/en/node/2582

Article by Debra Redsteer, “Leupp, Arizona: A Shared Historic Space for the Navajo Nation and Japanese Americans.”

Debra Redsteer’s article ends with a passage that emphasizes the importance of place(s) as markers of important events—events that reveal past struggles and also the historical connections between the experiences of different communities. She writes of the former Leupp Isolation Center in Arizona:

“Once Old Leupp was a bustling place with people abounding there, but now it is almost deserted. At one time, the area saw an Indian boarding school and, at another time, an isolation center, but what these two developments—occurring at two different historical moments for two different racial-ethnic groups—shared was the experience of forced imprisonment. The land in which the Leupp site is set is harsh with periodic flooding, vicious windstorms, extreme heat and cold of the high desert, and very little rainfall. The Navajo residents raise a few goats and contend with their hostile environment by trying to better their lives. The reminders of rubble, which are part of the landscape, convey that the Navajo is not alone in enduring discrimination and hardships, for Japanese Americans, in the early 1940s, suffered injustices here as well. The rubble thus acts as a reminder to future and present generations of Navajos and Americans of the frailty of American civil rights.”