Letter to the Editor: What we don’t see

Dear editor:

We sometimes drive past sights near home —  scenic and otherwise — without  actually seeing what we’re seeing. I felt that way last week when I visited the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center/ Japanese Relocation Camp, right along the highway between Powell and Cody. We’ve zoomed past there often, but this time we stopped to look around.

I learned that one of the reconstructed buildings was located for a time in Greybull!  The building had been one of the barracks which comprised housing for relocated Japanese-American families, and when the camp closed, it was sawed into three sections which were hauled to Greybull.  I don’t know where that was located or what it was used for in Greybull, but recently it was hauled back to the original Heart Mountain site and put back together, now used as a lecture hall. 

There’s a great museum-like building to visit now, but the historic site has interactive titles of “relocation,” “internment,” “relocation” and others.  In reality, it was a fenced concentration camp with guard towers enclosing 650 barracks.   Approximately 14,000 people passed through within the few years it housed Japanese families. 

Doubtless, anti-Japanese sentiment prevailed during those years of World War II,  but I have to say, as I visited this exhibit, I wasn’t proud of America for some of the actions our country took at that time:   relocating innocent, harmless families, taking them from  their homes with only a suitcase, leaving jobs, businesses, schools, longtime communities and personal assets behind.  

Did our country really do that?  Apparently, yes. Citizenship credentials were disregarded — Japanese ancestry or sometimes merely appearance allowed then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, gathering Japanese-American families, loading them onto trains, then transporting them to jail-like facilities in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin for one. 

I squirmed at the quotes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. I wanted to apologize to someone — anyone — when I heard the words of Wyoming’s own Governor Nels Smith who derogatorily referred to “Japs” who needed to be confined, for the safety of the USA.  These “criminals”  whose “crime” was that they looked to be of Asian ancestry, were apprehended and confined without cause. Surely, this couldn’t happen in today’s America. Right?

Pull in next time you pass by.  It’s worth the time.  See what you see.    

Mary B. Flitner

Shell