2012 Grant Project Summaries

Please note: projects are listed by the states of the grant recipients.

Arizona

Recipient: Developing Innovations in Navajo Education Inc.

Project Title: Japanese-American Leupp Citizen Isolation Center Project
Grant Award: $290,000
Site(s): Leupp Citizen Isolation Center, AZ
Description: Developing Innovations in Navajo Education Inc. will produce a full-length documentary film that explores the Leupp Citizen Isolation Center on the Navajo reservation at Leupp, Arizona. The isolation center, where 83 young men of Japanese descent were held, previously had served as a federal boarding school for Navajo youngsters. None of the Japanese Americans held here (79 were U.S. citizens) was ever charged, though some were tricked into losing their American citizenship. The film will center on internee Taneyuki Dan Harada, who will talk about his experience through his paintings, which include revealing self-portraits and well-known works such as “Barracks: Topaz, Utah,” which he created in 1944 and which now hangs in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The film also will include interviews with Navajo people who will talk about life at Leupp before, during, and after the existence of the Japanese American isolation center. Navajo stories of confinement and loss of cultural traditions parallel those of Japanese Americans.

California

Recipient: Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

Project Title: Telling the Stories of Japanese American detainees on Angel Island during World War II
Grant Award: $25,573
Site(s): Angel Island Detention Station, Marin County, CA
Description: From March to October 1942, seven groups of Japanese Americans, rounded up in Hawaii and shipped to the U.S. mainland, arrived on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. They were detained there for a week to a month before being sent to U.S. Department of Justice detention camps. Recent renovation of the Angel Island barracks where they were held have uncovered wall writings identified by San Francisco State University Professor Charles Egan as those of the Japanese Hawaiian detainees. This project seeks to preserve those writings for visitors to Angel Island, which already is known for poems carved into the barracks walls by Chinese immigrants who were detained there when Angel Island was a U.S. Immigration Station, in use from 1910 to 1940. A National Historic Landmark, the Angel Island station was the major West Coast processing center for immigrants coming from scores of countries. Currently, the former hospital at the site is being converted into an immigration museum. This project will highlight the newly found Japanese Hawaiian writings and the Japanese American experience during World War II by adding to existing displays in the barracks and/or in the new museum. Information also will be posted on the website of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and efforts made to develop written materials to enhance public awareness.

Recipient: Japanese American Citizens League

Project Title: Passing the Legacy Down: Youth Interpretations of Confinement Sites in the Western United States
Grant Award: $150,130
Site(s): Manzanar National Historic Site, Inyo County, CA Minidoka National Historic site, Jerome County, ID Tule Lake National Monument, Modoc County, CA
Description: This project will continue the Japanese American Citizens League “Bridging Communities” program, which was funded by a previous Japanese American Confinement Sites grant. The program engages a diverse group of 100 students, including American Muslims, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic Americans, in learning about Japanese American confinement through interactive workshops and service learning projects at three confinement sites: Manzanar, Minidoka, and Tule Lake. Students work with superintendents and other National Park Service staff on projects such as site development or cleanup. A film is produced in which students share their experiences with other youth and talk about opportunities available with the NPS. Once again, the Japanese American Citizens League will partner with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Los Angeles, San Francisco/Northern California and Seattle to develop education curriculum for the program.

Recipient: Venice Community Housing Corporation

Project Title: Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker
Grant Award: $50,000
Site(s): Manzanar National Historic Site, Inyo County, CA
Description: The Venice Community Housing Corporation will design, build, and install a memorial marker at the spot where 1,000 Japanese Americans from Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu, California, reported for transport to Manzanar Relocation Center in April 1942. The marker will provide a brief history of Japanese removal and internment, urge vigilance for constitutional rights, and feature quotations from former Manzanar internees, as well as a directional map from Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu to the Manzanar Interpretive Center on Highway 395. A group of teachers will create a K-12 curriculum to enhance instruction about the U.S. government’s treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, incorporating themes of identity, prejudice, and discrimination, and the importance of standing up for one’s rights. The group will train other teachers how to utilize the curriculum, place it on the Internet for download, and make DVDs, books, and other instructional materials available.

Recipient: East Bay Center for the Performing Arts

Project Title: Hidden Legacy: Japanese Traditional Performing Arts in the World War II Internment Camps
Grant Award: $138,586
Site(s): Multiple
Description: Using historical footage and interviews with artists who were interned, the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts will produce a documentary film telling the story of how traditional Japanese cultural arts were maintained in the hostile environment of the internment camps. Internment camp studies usually focus on political and legal aspects of internment or on activities in the camps that pertain to American culture, such as baseball and swing music. This project, however, will document the existence of traditional Japanese music, dance, and drama, created as artists constructed instruments and equipment from scrap material available to them. A half-hour documentary suitable for broadcast on public television will be delivered, as well as a one-hour film in DVD format that will be made available to the National Park Service for showing at confinement sites. Central to this project are interviews and histories researched and collected by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto-Wong, the project’s creative director, who has identified musicians, performers, and drama groups from nine of the 10 War Relocation Centers.

Colorado

Recipient: Colorado Preservation, Inc.

Project Title: Amache Barrack Relocation and Rehabilitation
Grant Award: $241,124
Site(s): Granada Relocation Center (Amache), Prowers County, CO
Description: This project builds on a 2010 Japanese American Confinement Sites grant that enabled Colorado Preservation, Inc. to identify and locate buildings that once were part of the Amache internment camp site. After World War II, some of the buildings were sold and moved, while others were dismantled or destroyed. An intact, former barrack building was located outside of Stonington, Colorado, where it most recently had been used as housing for migrant workers. The barrack, which has a high degree of historic integrity, has been donated by the owner to the Amache Preservation Society. Colorado Preservation, Inc. proposes to return the barrack to the Amache site, where it will be located on one of the camp’s original concrete foundations and near a guard tower and water tower that also are being reconstructed at the site, which was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2006. The rehabilitated barrack will serve as an important landmark and tool for interpretation of residential life at the former camp.

Hawaii

Recipient: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii

Project Title: ‘Just’ Youth: Taking the Lessons of Hawaii’s WWII Confinement Sites to Our High Schools
Grant Award: $64,795
Site(s): Honouliuli Internment Camp, Honolulu County, HI, and other Hawaii sites
Description: Through outreach presentations developed by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i (JCCH), this project aims to engage high school students in the study of Japanese American confinement and related issues of justice and equality that resonate today. JCCH will update materials and make study units available to social studies teachers and schools through its Resource Center and website. JCCH staff and trained volunteers will make presentations at 12 schools, where students will be encouraged to develop projects that link lessons learned about Japanese American confinement in Hawaii to current issues such as discrimination and bullying in schools. Students at six participating schools will we given the opportunity to tour the Honouliuli Internment Camp site. The project will culminate in May 2014 with a public event featuring student projects and dialogue.

Idaho

Recipient: Friends of Minidoka

Project Title: Minidoka Guard Tower Reconstruction
Grant Award: $280,378
Site(s): Minidoka National Historic Site, Jerome County, ID
Description: When incarcerees, employees, and visitors entered Minidoka Relocation Center, they passed by a tall guard tower staffed by an armed soldier. Such an imposing structure was an important feature of the visual landscape at Minidoka. As such, the Friends of Minidoka propose to reconstruct the historic tower, which will require demolition of a paved parking lot at the historic site’s entrance. Parking will be reconfigured to make it safer and more accessible for visitors. Friends of Minidoka is working in partnership with the Boise State University Construction Management and Engineering Department, as well as the National Park Service, in planning, designing, and constructing the guard tower. The tower will be reconstructed according to historic photographs.

Recipient: University of Idaho

Project Title: Kooskia Internment Camp Archaeological Project (KICAP)
Grant Award: $24,132
Site(s): Kooskia Internment Camp, Idaho County, ID
Description: North Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp was an all-male camp, occupied by Japanese American internees who came from other camps to work, for pay, on highway construction projects. With the help of two previous Japanese American Confinement Sites grants, preliminary field research was conducted at the site, during which significant archeological deposits were identified and cataloged. Recovered artifacts, such as gambling pieces, smoking pipes, and an abundance of tobacco cans, reflect Kooskia’s unusual demographic. This 2012 JACS grant will allow the University of Idaho to return to Kooskia to excavate the site extensively. Funding will cover the cost of hiring, feeding, housing and transporting the field school staff, conducting lab work, and acquiring necessary equipment such as a GIS mapping machine. Additional public outreach also will be made possible.

*Under California, see the Japanese American Citizens League project, “Passing the Legacy Down: Youth Interpretations of Confinement Sites in the Western United States.”

Illinois

Recipient: Japanese American Service Committee

Project Title: “The Legacy Center Archives”
Grant Award: $75,268
Site(s): Multiple
Description: Founded in 1999, the Legacy Center houses the Japanese American Service Committee archives, which contains documents and artifacts that represent all facets of Japanese American life immediately before, during and after internment. This grant will allow the JASC to process and catalog its collection according to standards adopted by the Society of American Archivists in 2004. The purchase of necessary software also will enhance capabilities to manage collections through the generation of record forms and accession records, for instance, as well as expanding and easing public access to the Legacy Center Archives.

Oregon

Recipient: Oregon Nikkei Endowment

Project Title: Minidoka Oral History Project
Grant Award: $168,460
Site(s): Minidoka National Historic Site, Jerome County, ID; and other camps.
Description: In the late 1990s, the Oregon Nikkei Endowment recorded the stories of 214 former Minidoka internees from Oregon. Recently, the 53 VHS tapes and 161 cassette tapes were converted into high quality digital format. They are available for use, however, only at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, a history and culture museum in Portland. This grant will allow the Oregon Nikki Endowment to make the interviews available online and also to produce three educational DVDs for use in classrooms, at Minidoka National Historic Site, and at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. The interviews will be housed on Densho’s servers, with access through the Oregon Nikkei Endowment website.

Texas

Recipient: Friends of the Texas Historical Commission, Inc.

Project Title: Japanese American and Enemy Alien Confinement at Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Texas
Grant Award: $25,580
Site(s): Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Zavala County, TX; four other Texas camps, indirectly.
Description: During World War II, Texas hosted three Department of Justice (DOJ) internment camps – at Crystal City, Kenedy, and Seagoville – as well as two U.S. Army “temporary confinement camps,” one at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, the other at Fort Bliss in El Paso. This project will build on previous grants from the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, which have enabled Friends of the Texas Historical Commission to begin documenting these sites. A 2009 JACS award, for instance, enabled the organization to print 25,000 brochures about the Crystal City Family Internment Camp and to manufacture eight interpretive panels for the site. The new, 2012 grant will fund an archeological survey of two key tracts at the Crystal City Family Internment Camp, pay for a research trip to the National Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and facilitate the drafting of a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the confinement site. The archeological survey will target remains in the immediate vicinity of the internee elementary school, as well as the camp’s bathhouses, swimming pool, and irrigation reservoir.

Utah

Recipient: Topaz Museum

Project Title: Topaz Museum and Education Center Construction Project
Grant Award: $714,314
Site(s): Topaz Relocation Center, Millard County, UT and other sites
Description: The Topaz Museum will use funding to construct an 8,254-square-foot building to house a museum and education center in Delta, Utah. The building, to be located on Delta’s main street, will have 3,248 square feet for exhibits, as well as an art gallery, research library, bookstore, curatorial and other space. An interpretive design plan for the museum, funded by a Japanese American Confinement Sites grant awarded in 2009, already is complete. Funding for the manufacture of exhibits and installations will come later. Once complete, the museum will foster the understanding and preservation of the Topaz Relocation Center and highlight the personal sacrifices and contributions of the more than 11,000 people who were interned there. Plans call for housing a collection of more than 1,000 artifacts, 70 pieces of artwork created by internees, more than 35 video interviews, and a significant number of books. A recreation hall from Block 42 at Topaz also will be located at the new center. The actual site of the Topaz internment camp, 16 miles from Delta, is remote but with high level of archeological integrity, which figured in the decision to build the museum in Delta. The camp site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007.

Washington

Recipient: Washington State University

Project Title: Enhancing Access to Heart Mountain Collections at Washington State University
Grant Award: $77,769
Site(s): Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Park County, WY
Description: This proposal builds upon Washington State University’s successful 2011 Japanese American Confinement Sites grant award by creating additional online research tools to enhance university collections related to Heart Mountain Relocation Center. The university will digitize, partially translate, and index key Heart Mountain resources so that visitors to the WSU Heart Mountain website will be able to browse (or search) names and retrieve information and photographs related to internees. Among resources to be digitized and indexed are the 330-page Heart Mountain Quarterly Census of March 31, 1944; the 75-page Heart Mountain Barracks Directory of January 1944; the 40-page Carpenters Club Directory of March 1945; the 104-page Heart Mountain Tempo Yearbook of 1944; 98 photographs and 114 pages of Heart Mountain ephemera. In addition, transcripts will be created for about 200 hours of interviews, and WSU Professor Emily Anderson will translate from Japanese sections of the 1935 History of Japanese in the Yakima Valley. Online finding aids will be created and a workshop offered to WSU faculty interested in teaching with primary sources related to Japanese American internment.

Recipient: Wing Luke Memorial Foundation d.b.a. Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience

Project Title: Honoring a Legacy, Forging a Future: Preserving the Stories and Collections of World War II Veterans and Internees
Grant Award: $170,833
Site(s): Minidoka National Historic Site, Jerome County, ID
Description: Since its founding in 1946, the Seattle Nisei Veterans Committee (NVC) has amassed a rich collection of artifacts, photographs, and documents related to Minidoka Relocation Center and the World War II military service of Japanese Americans, including that of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. This grant will allow the nearby Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (The Wing) to preserve these materials, which include correspondence and photographs, as well as dozens of collected oral histories. More men volunteered to serve in the 442nd from the Minidoka camp than any other, and, of all the camps, Minidoka suffered the greatest number of casualties. The Wing will catalog items into an online database and create an exhibition at the NVC Hall, as well as a traveling display to help educate the public about the lasting impacts of incarceration on the Japanese American community in the greater Seattle area. The NVC collection is in critical need of preservation, care, and, especially, interpretation.

Recipient: Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project (Seattle, WA)

Project Title: Japanese American Confinement Sites Encyclopedia-Phase II
Grant Award: $362,450
Site(s): All 10 War Relocation Authority camps and other sites
Description: Building on work completed under previous Japanese American Confinement Sites grants, Densho will expand its free, online encyclopedia from the current 360 articles to more than 1,000 articles about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Densho will market the encyclopedia, aiming to make it the “go to” online resource for those who want to learn about, study, or teach about Japanese American confinement sites. Articles in the encyclopedia will be indexed and linked to multitudes of primary resources associated with Japanese American confinement sites, including the 750 oral history interviews and 50,000 photos and documents that will be contained in the Densho Archive by 2013.

Wyoming

Recipient: Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation

Project Title: Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation--Website Project
Grant Award: $30,976
Site(s): Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Park County, WY
Description: The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation will enhance the educational impact of the new Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center, which opened in August 2011, by offering state-of-the-art web access. This grant will allow the foundation to expand and redesign the Learning Center’s website, develop a virtual tour, and incorporate new content, with additional links and virtual connections to other historical sites, museums, and collections. A grade-specific, interactive, K-12 curriculum will be created in which students, teachers, and other groups will have access to the Learning Center’s archives and artifacts, and will be able to share comments and questions online.