Located on the arid, windy plains near the Colorado-Kansas border, about a 3. 5-hour drive southeast of Denver and its famous Rocky Mountains, the Grenada Relocation Center is a go-to place for many travelers. But that may soon change.
Abandoned in 1945 at the end of World War II, the center (officially known as Amache National Historic Site) includes only a handful of reconstructed and restored military-style barracks, a water tower, and a watchtower emerging from the short, dry grass of the prairie. mugwort. . . But look closely and locate rows of more than 10,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned or treated here between 1942 and 1945.
“It may seem like there’s not much there,” said Dr. Harris. Bonnie J. Clark, a professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Denver, who co-directs the Amache Project, is reading and helping to maintain the site. The more time you spend there, the harder and more evocative it is. “
In February 2024, those haunting ruins just outside the village of Granada, Colorado, which has a population of 400, officially became the newest (and perhaps most unlikely) national park in the United States. According to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the creation of the site as a federal territory is a very important step in remembering the painful history suffered by Japanese Americans.
Few Memories of Amache’s Darkness Beyond Today (Alamy)
“As a nation, we will have to confront the mistakes of our afterlife to build a more just and equitable future,” Haaland said in a statement. “The Department of the Interior is immensely honored to manage America’s public lands and herbalists. “and cultural resources to tell a complete and fair story of our nation’s history. “
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment swept across the country, with many suspecting that Japanese and Japanese Americans might be acting as spy agents and enemies of the state. In 1942, U. S. President Franklin Roosevelt legalized army commanders to forcibly expel what they considered a national security risk.
The order did not specify any ethnic group. But it paved the way for the U. S. to order the return of Japanese citizens and Japanese American citizens to prison centers from the western United States, Amache added.
The mass expulsion affected more than 120,000 men, women, and young people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were U. S. citizens. With only 4 days to two weeks’ notice, citizens were ordered to pack up their belongings and leave their homes to Initially, some other people were sent to transitional “meeting centers” that were clustered at fairgrounds and race tracks until permanent camps could be built (many of them through the inmates themselves).
Because those incarceration camps were rarely talked about within the Japanese-American network after the war ended in 1945, descendants, such as Dr. Kirsten Leong, knew very little about her family’s history.
Amache was once home to about 7,500 more people in a one-square-mile domain (Alamy)
“The fact that I don’t know much about this holiday is not unusual in my generation,” said Leong, whose relatives of the maternal grandmother were detained in Amache.
As a child, Leong remembers hearing a story about how her loved ones were forced to leave their Los Angeles home and move to a collection center just 21 miles away in the city of Arcadia. Here, at the famous Santa Anita Racetrack, where thoroughbred champion Seabiscuit had won. Two years earlier, other people were forced to live in swapped stables.
“My grandmother would wrinkle her nose and grimace,” Leong said. “I had never understood this until I learned that, three days before, the horses were living in the stables. “
Leong’s relatives moved a few months later to Amache, one of 10 containment sites in the United States, known as “relocation centers. “From Tule Lake in California to Heart Mountain in Wyoming and Minidoka in Idaho, the centers were built in remote areas. public land, away from towns and villages.
The Amache Preservation Society has exhibited symptoms around the world and has worked to maintain its reminiscence (Alamy)
Amache, the smallest incarceration camp in the country, was the only resettlement center built on personal land confiscated through eminent domain (which allows the U. S. government to take personal property and convert it for public use). It opened on Aug. 27, 1942, and temporarily grew to become the 10th largest city in Colorado, with about 7,500 citizens confined to just one square mile at its peak, making it 50% more densely populated than New York City at the time, according to the National Park Service.
In many ways, Amache’s unlikely evolution from an abandoned criminal to a U. S. national park is a key factor in the development of the country. UU. se is due to a former Granada high school instructor and current principal named John Hopper. In 1993, Hopper began documenting the history of Amache as part of a class project and founded the Amache. Preservation Society (APS). With the help of student volunteers and organizations such as the City of Grenada and the University of Denver, APS reconstructed the site’s buildings, renovated its cemetery, and established the Amache Museum and Research Center in Grenada.
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“Most Japanese-American boarding schools lived for more than three years in the square kilometer that stretches south,” said an adviser to the self-consulting tour, who introduced an ancient context as he passed through the stop.
Despite the harsh situations in the camp, the internees worked together and created an active community. Organized as a military camp, there were 29 residential blocks, each containing 12 barracks used as living quarters, plus a dining hall and recreation room. Six families lived in bachelor huts and shared bathrooms, allowing them little privacy.
Conditions in Amache were incredibly overcrowded, but families went to great lengths to create a sense of normalcy (Credit: Calisphere E-90)
In addition, there were hospitals and schools, social activities, and sports programs, including Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The families farmed, established a successful screen printing workshop, and created a cooperative with hairdressers, shoe stores, and much more. The barbed rope did its best to maintain a sense of normalcy, even as armed guards patrolled the camp and guarded the eight watchtowers surrounding the perimeter.
Amache closed after World War II, and once the last people left in October 1945, its buildings were either demolished or sold to the public.
Every two years since 2008 (minus 2020), Clark has conducted archaeological fieldwork and site surveys alongside scholars and Amache survivors and discoverers. At the end of the summer, he presents his discoveries at open days for Amache families and the general public. Over the years, he discovered evidence that locals had planted gardens and discovered the remains of a sumo stand, Japanese restrooms, trails, and baseball fields. The thousands of Siberian poplars and elms they have planted are a reminder of life in Amache.
“I think that investment in a position [that] other people didn’t choose to live in speaks to an emphasis on one’s own humanity and also on caring for others,” Clark said.
Survivors of Clark and Amache have conducted archaeological excavations to maintain the legacy of the site (Alamy)
Although Leong still knows very little about her family’s life in Amache, other than the fact that one of her uncles graduated from the prison’s top school and the other taught there, she learned more when she volunteered with Clark in 2012.
What is evident to her is how the prejudices that sought to dissolve Japanese communities after World War II have reverberated in modern times. Incarceration not only structured the Japanese-American family, but also created generational trauma beyond World War II, when other people were driven to start a new life away from the Japanese-American communities that no longer existed on much of the West Coast.
“They were allowed to go ‘home,’ but there’s no home to go back to,” Leong said. “My generation [is] discovering, ‘Oh, that’s why I don’t know any other Japanese. That’s why we do it. ” Not communicating about our heritage. “
Today, visitors to the last U. S. national park have been able to visit the U. S. National Park. Visitors to the U. S. can see the three decades of preservation efforts by the APS, such as the restored towers and recreation hall, as well as the cemetery and “monumental space. “to protect cremated remains. But since the inmates didn’t have to leave ashes after their release in 1945, there is now a memorial honoring those who died while incarcerated in Amache. A second monument to the sick of the U. S. Army was erected in Amache. in the cemetery in 1983.
According to Christopher Mather, Amache’s site manager, it will take a few years for the NPS to implement more education systems and a committed guest center. But until the end of summer 2024, Mather says staff will be available to accompany visitors on free tours inside the recreation room and barracks. (See the NPS site for up-to-date information. )Meanwhile, the NPS says the self-guided field trip created through APS is the most productive way for visitors to be more informed about the site’s activities. history.
The restored buildings in the Amache Preservation Society (Alamy) bear witness to the
Mather suggests that visitors start at the Amache Museum, about 1. 5 miles from the Amache National Historic Site. There, visitors can see photographs and old documents from the prisons, as well as archaeological finds from the site and artifacts donated through survivors, from an intricate kimono to an undeniable suitcase containing the few personal belongings allowed. This is also the place to get old maps and data from NPS staff, who work in their offices, before visiting the actual/physical camp.
“The museum is where a lot of other people get the data they want, then swoon and have fun there,” Mather said.
Mather acknowledges that Amache’s new designation as a national park is the culmination of decades of work. But by sharing the stories of survival and pain, he hopes his reports will resonate in the future.
“This is a story that wants to be told,” he said, “so that it doesn’t repeat itself. “