Heart Mountain (above) is the site of an American Concentration Camp in Wyoming. One of the incarcerees left a bequest for ‘something to be done’, and now much is being done here to teach people about the injustice sustained here from 1942 until 1945. There is an original barracks, a guard tower ‘built to spec’, memorials, artwork, and a remarkably personal and revealing museum. Renovations, expansion, acquisitions and outreach are ongoing.

While most sites choose not to use the term “concentration camp”, due to its association with the Holocaust, one of the incarcerees in the film uses that term plainly, the then Governor used the term in arguing in favor, and that was the term used most commonly at the time. Many of the Americans who were sent there had never seen so many people of Japanese descent in one place at the same time. What else are you going to call a facility that literally concentrates one group of citizens based on racial/ethnic identity in a prison camp?

What makes the exhibits here better than other sites is that they go one or two steps deeper in describing the experience. When the site started, “it was like pulling teeth” to get incarcerees to talk about it, but then gradually the stories started coming out: a dog left behind that refused to eat and died alone, a beautiful older lady describing how she was spat on and called a slur as a child, and a family recounting the suicide of their father after being robbed and rejected by their community upon release with $25.

The museum pulls no punches in their descriptions, making it plain that these innocent American civilians had their rights abrogated and in many cases lost everything, due to racism. Instead of recognizing that we were at war with an enemy nation, our government and most Americans also declared war on a racial/ ethnic group of their fellow citizens. While J Edgar Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt counseled against the program as ‘unfounded’ and ‘unjust’ respectively, FDR approved the military’s ‘relocation program’ recommendation for ‘sensitive military areas’, which the military interpreted as the entire west coast.

“The Japanese race is an enemy race
and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil,
possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’,
the racial strains are undiluted.”
“A Jap is a Jap.”

Lt. Gen. John DeWitt,
architect and overseer of the American Concentration Camps