On the southeastern plains of
Colorado, on 560 acres of stunted elms, yuccas and broken concrete,
you can find the remains of Colorado’s only concentration
camp. Here, from 1942-1945, over 14,000 men, women and children
were held against their will, patrolled by military police and
surrounded by barbed wire and eight guard towers.
Their
crime? They were of Japanese descent, though the majority were U.S.
citizens. Japan’s sneak attack against Pearl Harbor in 1941
had spooked the nation, and under Presidential Executive Order
9066, titled “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese
Ancestry,” farmers, fishermen and shopkeepers were evacuated,
mainly from the West Coast, and taken to internment camps. When
they were freed at the war’s end, most found they’d
lost everything they owned.
Thanks to the efforts of high
school teacher John Hopper in the small town of Granada, Camp
Amache has begun to tell its 65-year-old story. The prison was
called Camp Amache after a Cheyenne Indian woman who was married to
pioneer rancher John Prowers. Hopper began with a course in the
camp’s history by telling that and other stories, and though
local families back his Amache history class now — with students
competing to get in — it was a struggle at first: “No one
wants to talk about racism.”
It helped that
Japanese-Americans who lived at Amache, and their children and
grandchildren, have begun visiting the site and eagerly telling the
students their life stories. “They have a need to share their
lives with a younger generation,” Hopper says.
In
turn, Hopper’s high school students give presentations about
the internment camp to groups that visit. They have also traveled
to colleges and universities to talk to classes about the explosion
of fear in this country that led to Japanese-Americans being held
captive in a remote corner of Colorado. Tours of the camp, now a
National Historic Landmark, have been led by the teenagers, and
recently, four students traveled to Japan to make presentations at
a Tokyo high school.
Ironies abound about the camp. Young
Japanese-American men were recruited from it to join the U.S. Army
and fight in the 442nd Regiment in Europe. This was the regiment
that received both the most casualties and the most decorations as
a result of the fight to liberate France. One of the
students’ favorite stories concerns an interned woman,
Katharine Odo, who became a teacher at Amache High School. At her
own expense after the war ended, Odo drove to colleges around the
country for 18 months, helping each of her Japanese-American
students to get admitted.
In some ways, the camp was an
economic boon for the surrounding community. Successful camp
gardens influenced local farmers to start growing crops
they’d never grown before — onions, watermelon and
cantaloupe. And inside the camp, where 95 percent of the original
foundations are intact, you can still see the koi ponds where
internees grew fish.
Even though the camp, which is one
of the most intact of the country’s 10 World War II
relocation prisons, has been closed for over six decades, it still
has much to teach us. It has attracted college students who want to
learn first-hand about historical archaeology. In May and June, the
University of Denver Museum of Anthropology hosted an exhibit
provocatively titled: “Confined Cuisine: Archaeology of
Culinary Culture at Camp Amache.” And thanks to both the
Amache Preservation Society and the Amache Historical Society,
street signs now show where the camp’s buildings were
located, including a silkscreen shop staffed by internees. It
produced posters under contract for the U.S. Navy.
My
stepfather was an attorney here in Prowers County years ago, and
when my brother went through his files after his death, he found
documents from Camp Amache. One was a typewritten speech by Marion
Konishi, Citizen Number 6E-12-D, in the camp’s legal files.
Konishi was the camp’s high school valedictorian, who spoke
to her graduating class on the assigned topic: “What does
America mean to you?”
She wrote on June 25, 1943:
“I hesitated — I was not sure of my answer. I wondered if
America still means and will mean freedom, equality, security and
justice when some of its citizens were segregated, discriminated
against and treated so unfairly. I knew I was not the only American
seeking an answer.”
Decades later, Americans still
seek answers to persistent questions about racial discrimination
and inequality. A good place to think about all this is a lonely
site in southeastern Colorado on what used to be called “Jap
Camp Road.”
Andrew Gulliford is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a professor of Southwest
studies and history at Fort Lewis College in
Colorado.
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