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July 8, 2006

Tragical History Tour

I
n a few minutes I'll be heading out to the site of the Mindoka Relocation Center for Japanese Americans in WWII, near Twin Falls, Idaho, with a busload of surviving former internees. We'll be touring the site with National Park Service guides, and later we'll visit a reconstructed barrack.

Reading Korematsu and the literature on the Japanese American internment is very important. But there's no better way really to understand the camps than to visit them, especially (if possible) with people who were warehoused there on account of nothing more than their ancestry.

There are camp sites in southern California (Manzanar) and northern California (Tule Lake), northwestern Wyoming near Yellowstone (Heart Mountain), eastern Colorado (Amache), central Utah (Topaz), southern Arizona (Poston and Gila River), southern Idaho (Minidoka), and southern Arkansas (Rohwer and Jerome). If your travels ever take you through any of those regions, stop by. It'll be worth it.

Posted by Eric at July 8, 2006 9:44 AM

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