President Biden authorized this new park in March, but it will take time to become fully established. The local community is important in determining whether a park is created, how it will happen and when. In this case, the local Granada High School has been working on preserving the history here for many years and is largely responsible for the reconstruction of the guard tower above.

As with Manzanar and Minidoka, the image of a guard tower evokes the reality of the imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII. Each of the towers surrounding Amache was manned with a machine gun and a spotlight. But inside the camps, it is often the Japanese cultural touches that strike me, the rock gardens in Manzanar and the silk screen shop here. The silk screen shop was so good, that the incarcerated citizens made posters for the US Navy. Despite their incarceration and wrongful denial of their Constitutional rights, these citizens were proud of their country and many of the children joined the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts here.

There are various monuments and markers remembering the 31 killed in action fighting for our country in Europe while their relatives were imprisoned, for the over 1,000 US military veterans from this camp including many interpreters, and for the over 100 inmates who died here, some before their time. While many were later reinterred elsewhere, a few graves remain in a Japanese styled cemetery, along with a memorial stone and a photo of the original epitaph, written in Japanese.

Interestingly, Colorado citizens of Japanese ancestry were not incarcerated, because the governor, Ralph Carr, correctly believed the program to be unconstitutional, arguing that once a majority violates the rights of a minority, “then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow.” His principles likely cost him his next election. (If the nearby town of Chivington wants to replace its shameful name, they could rename their town Carr).

But the Japanese [Americans] are protected by the same Constitution that protects us.
An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. …
If you harm them, you must first harm me.
I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred.
I grew to despise it, because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.

Colorado Governor Ralph Carr to a hostile audience in 1942