Heart Mountain

Heart Mountain Relocation Center

A few weekends ago we went to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.

I didn't know what heart mountain was when I went. I found out that it was a prison for Japanese Americans during WWII. Their crime? Having a Japanese Heritage.

The Heart Mountain Relocation Center opened in August 1942 and imprisoned more than 14,000 people during its three-year existence. The last incarcerees left the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in November, 1945.

In August of 2011, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation opened its doors to the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, a world-class museum dedicated to passing on the Heart Mountain story to future generations. Through photographs, artifacts, oral histories and the interactive exhibits, guests to the Center experience life at Heart Mountain through the eyes of those Japanese and Japanese Americans that were confined here during WWII. The Center provides an overview of the wartime relocation of Japanese Americans, including the background history of anti-Asian prejudice in America and the factors leading to their enforced relocation and confinement. Special emphasis is given to the experience of incarceration, the diverse personal responses of Japanese Americans to their imprisonment, constitutional issues, violations of civil liberties and civil rights, and the broader issues of race and social justice in the U.S.

I find it hard to believe that our country would do this to it's own citizens, yes most of these people were American Citizens, born in the US. It is true and this wasn't the only internment camp, I mean relocation center...

"Racism, under whatever justification its supporters can find, is still racism. It goes against what makes us all Americans. There is no racial or religious test for being an American. We should not start one now."

 - USA TODAY

The people in these camps tried their best to go on with everyday life. 

There were even Girl Scouts at Heart Mountain, I look about as happy as they do in this picture.

After a couple of years the US Government decided to let Japanese Americans join the fight. Their unit was segregated however and it grew to be the most decorated unit in the war.

Most of the relocated residents of the camps lost everything they owned.

The lights in the picture below represent the camps that Japanese American were sent to.

SAVE-A-BARRACK*

 A complete, full-length barrack built at the “Heart Mountain Relocation Center” during World War II has come “home” to the National Historic Landmark site. With a tremendous response from individual donors and organizations, the barrack has been rescued from demolition near Shell, WY—about 80 miles from Heart Mountain.

After being moved from Heart Mountain, it was one of several barracks that the city of Greybull used for veteran’s housing. It endured another move to the ISU geology field station in 1958. Because it has been cut into three sections during these two previous moves, the building had to be moved back to Heart Mountain in three pieces to ensure its structural integrity. To maintain historical accuracy at the Heart Mountain site, the barrack has returned to where there once stood five barracks as part of the Military Police complex. 

It will now remain a fixture of the landscape that can speak not only to the Japanese American confinement during World War II but the extended Big Horn Basin history.

If it so moves you, please donate to the save a Barrack fund, I believe everyone should know about Heart Mountain and the other Relocation Centers so that it never happens again.

Be sure to visit http://heartmountain.org/index.html