The theme of our 2026 grantee gathering, “We Were Here Before. We Will Be Here After,” speaks to our knowledge that the past fails to stay in the past until we challenge and overcome the injustice of our present. Our gathering coincides with the 250th anniversary of the U.S., but while our federal government has been celebrating with parades and shows of military power, we will be complicating and enriching this narrative of U.S. history. At Heart Mountain, we will interrogate what constitutes U.S. history, what it means to belong, what citizenship is, and who gets to tell their stories to ask ourselves how we can build and develop solidarity in practice.
For most Americans, what is known about the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans is that the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, triggered President FDR’s issuance of Executive Order 9066, authorizing their forced removal. However, the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII was rooted in decades of anti-Japanese and anti-Asian prejudice. Before EO 9066, there were laws that restricted or prohibited Japanese immigration, land ownership, and U.S. naturalization. Tensions between Japan and the U.S. had been broiling since the 1930s, and the FBI had also been surveilling members of the Japanese immigrant community.
Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a mandatory curfew was imposed, first on Japanese legal residents and then on Japanese American citizens. All were required to carry identification. Further, several thousand first generation Japanese American community leaders were rounded up and arrested. These community leaders, alongside over 2,000 German nationals and a small number of Italian nationals, were incarcerated at various sites run by the Department of Justice and U.S. Army. While the Justice Department and Office of Naval Intelligence concluded that the remaining Japanese American community did not pose a threat, political opportunists pushed for more stringent actions against Japanese Americans. In the battle between Roosevelt’s Justice and War departments, the latter won.
Under EO 9066, approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans living in California and parts of Oregon and Washington were given only days to dispose of or secure their possessions, including land and homes. They were instructed to bring what they could carry—no more than 100 pounds per person—and required to report to one of sixteen temporary “Assembly Centers.” From there, most were transferred to hastily constructed incarceration camps in remote areas with harsh climates across Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Idaho, and Arkansas, while some were sent directly to these camps. For up to three years, the U.S. government incarcerated its own citizens solely because of their Japanese ancestry.
On June 29, 2026, we will be coming together to visit one of these confinement sites — the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Powell, Wyoming. It was constructed and opened in 1942 on 46,000 acres of land that had been home to the Crow, Blackfeet and Shoshone Indians before it was reclaimed by the federal government. On this site, 14,997 Japanese Americans were confined in barracks and surrounded by barbed wire and nine guard towers.
Inside Heart Mountain, families tried to stay together, people organized to create a sense of civic life, and artists documented what they witnessed. Japanese Americans contributed their agricultural knowledge to transform the dry Wyoming desert by constructing root cellars to store crops, including familiar root vegetables such as daikon and gobo, that provided less than half the food for families. Our tour will include a stop at a root cellar, which is one of the only surviving camp structures built entirely by the incarcerees.
As we will learn, resistance in the camp took many forms — some young men served in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Unit for a country that had imprisoned them and others refused to serve in the U.S. military and were sent to federal penitentiaries – both in order to call attention to the unjust treatment of their community. Those who served are memorialized on the Heart Mountain Military Honor Roll which will be part of our tour. Heart Mountain was also the center of resistance to the military draft resulting in two mass trials. In the largest mass trial in Wyoming history, 63 draft resisters were convicted and sentenced in 1944 to three years in federal prisons. One year later, 20 more were tried and sentenced to two years in prison. Another group of eight men who were leaders of the Fair Play Committee, a group opposed to their incarceration and military draft, were tried for inciting others to violate the Selective Service Act. Seven of the eight were convicted and sentenced to terms in federal prisons.
Through the years, those who could leave the incarceration camps were given only $25 and a train ticket. The Heart Mountain Confinement Site closed in November 1945, and the remaining few hundred incarcerees left, forced to start over from scratch in a country still filled with racial hostility.
In the decades since its closing, the Japanese American community has organized to tell their stories, seek redress, and memorialize what they experienced to ensure that the past is neither seen as static nor unrepeatable. Sites such as the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which opened in August 2011, are a meaningful step forward.
Why We Gather
I sought to seed the barren earth
And make wild beauty take
Firm root, but how could I have known
The waiting long would shake
Me inwardly, until I dared
Not say what I would gain
From such untimely planting, or
What flower worth the pain?
Our gathering at the Heart Mountain World War II Japanese American Confinement Site is not simply a visit to a historical site. It is an intentional act of reckoning with how histories of racial exclusion and state violence continue to reverberate into the present. As scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past, history is not a fixed record but a process shaped by power—by who gets to speak, by what is remembered, by what is erased, and by whose suffering is allowed to become legible.
The forced incarceration of 110,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945 was not an aberration born solely of wartime panic. It was the culmination of decades of anti-Asian legislation, surveillance, and manufactured fear. And this history does not stand alone. It belongs to a longer arc of race-based violence and suppression in which Indigenous people were massacred and dispossessed of their lands through deliberate campaigns of elimination and in which Black people were enslaved, exploited, and systemically denied freedom and dignity. These are not separate histories. They are interwoven expressions of the same logic of racial domination that has determined who is protected by this country’s laws and who is targeted by them.
When we visit Heart Mountain, we are not looking backward. We are holding a mirror to the present. To stand on the grounds of Heart Mountain is to confront what happened there and the forces that minimize or distort this history in dominant narratives of U.S. democracy. The stories of Heart Mountain have been systematically erased from the national record, or what Trouillot would call a “silencing,” the suppression of unsettling truths from the archive of national memory. As our country marks its 250th anniversary with parades and celebrations of American exceptionalism, we are called to complicate that “triumphant” narrative. To stand on these grounds is to refuse that silencing. These stories are not mere footnotes. They are central to an honest account of what this country is today, but not what it must remain.
Physical presence matters. There is something irreducible about standing on land where families confined behind barbed wire endeavored to retain a semblance of home for their children and where root cellars built by incarcerees’ own hands still exist. These are not abstractions. By physically entering this space, we challenge those silences and insist on a fuller accounting of the past, one that acknowledges not only the injustice of incarceration but also the resistance and organizing of those who endured it. The work of solidarity we are called to do across issues and constituencies is grounded in the same insistence that the people most targeted by state power are not peripheral to American life, but central to its story.
Remembrance to Action
This movement moment demands that we organize to transform systems now being employed to accelerate racial exclusion and state violence to bring about material change for our communities–be it affordable housing and healthcare– or faith in government, the courts, and civic institutions. Heart Mountain is a site of memory. And it is a site of instruction. The incarcerees who organized, who tended the earth and coaxed life from an unforgiving landscape, who resisted the draft and who served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who documented what they witnessed, and who demanded redress—they did not wait to be remembered. Their resistance is not a legacy to admire from a distance. It is an inheritance that demands action from us today.
Resources
As you begin your trip, take a moment to look at this curated resource guide to learn more here.
