A day at Heart Mountain Interpretive Center

 

View of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. (Courtesy Photo)

Half-way between the sparse 30 mile stretch of Wyoming Veterans Memorial Highway (Highway 14A) that takes travelers to and from the small towns of Cody and Powell, a turn north onto Road 19 leads back in time. Visible from the highway, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center brings to life through photographs, artifacts, and oral histories the experience of the Japanese and Japanese American people who during WWII were interned under the shadow of the looming and singular Heart Mountain. While I’ve gone to the Center many times, on June 3, a need to get out of the house combined with cloudy skies and chances of lightening, sent me again to the Center looking for a quiet moment.

I was lucky/smart enough to plan my visit on the day former internee and 2014 Advisor in Residence Eva Nakamura Kuwata was speaking. A native of California and only child of two parents with Japanese ancestry, she was interned in the relocation camp during her early childhood and says “because I was so young, it was kind of an adventure to be here. … For me, it was just part of my life.” Kuwata went on to recount memories of her first time seeing snow in Wyoming, of making friends in camp and joining Brownies, and of both kind people and discrimination she encountered in neighboring communities. When the war ended, Kuwata said her family returned to California, “but we had nothing really to go back to.”

2014 Heart Mountain Interpretive Center Advisor in Residence Eva Kuwata sits in front of the memorial garden with a view of Heart Mountain in the distance. (photos by Heidi Hansen)

“There is a Japanese saying, ‘Shikata Ga Nai,’ this means ‘can’t be helped.’ That is what my parents told me,” Kuwata said. “And I was an only child. No one told me I should ask more questions. My parents took it in stride that we had to go. There was no bitterness. Well, they might have been bitter, but they didn’t show it to me.”

Later, I asked Kuwata why she wanted to come back to Heart Mountain and tell her story of internment. Her answer was simple: “A lady I worked with had never heard of the camps, she didn’t know this had happened. Then when I told her I had been in the camps, she was telling everyone: ‘Eva was in those camps.’” Today, Kuwata is a retired grandmother of two and cancer survivor who regularly attends Japanese folk dancing classes. She characterized returning to Heart Mountain as a “wonderful experience.”

For those present at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center that day, Kuwata’s memories of camp life provided a unique narrative lens into one of our country’s darker historical periods. However, a visit to the Center on any day will discover a rich and detailed multi-narrative approach to storytelling.

A display inside the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center tells the story of a family interned during WWII.

Upon entering, the first display combines newspaper clippings and photographs about the bombing of Pearl Harbor with historical and personal narratives. As you walk through the museum, you learn to look for side-bars labelled “Through my Eyes” that feature diary entries or retellings of camp life as well as placards that highlight the histories of various families who were interned at the camp. David Spurr in his book The Rhetoric of Empire suggests writers in the post-colonial era often attempt to idealize historically oppressed groups in order to compensate for their own continued guilt. He identifies a pattern where tragedy is trivialized in the face of “transcendent human spirit.” This is not so at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. The multi-narrative approach to storytelling resists any simple idealization of the former internees precisely because space is given to so many different voices, and none are the same. (Take a virtual tour of the museum here.)

              

And through these different voices, I learn that people in the camp continued living: they planted gardens and organized sporting events, they went to school and had jobs, they made life-long friendships, some fell in love and got married. But I also learn the interned Japanese and Japanese American people faced tremendous hardships: they were forcibly removed from their homes – their entire lives, they now lived in tiny barracks behind barb wire under the surveillance of armed guards, their basic human rights were fundamentally violated. These aspects are not downplayed in the museum. In that sense, the museum embodies the vow humanitarian writer Laura Flynn made after witnessing the violence of a military coup in Haiti: “repeat the story, don’t measure worth, set down the words that will not rest.” At the Interpretive Center, all stories matter – all stories are told.

In the TED Talk “The danger of a single story,” writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says “Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Through the power of storytelling at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, operations manager Bethany Hamilton Sandvik said one of their goals is to be a place of healing for former internees. But for outsiders, what can the point be? To be the listeners and allies. I leave with a greater appreciation of the fragility of the “freedom” we cherish so much in the West as well as the importance of continued human rights advocacy supporting minority groups who are oppressed today.

Read my interview with anthropologist and Heart Mountain Interpretive Center board member Aura Newlin here.