Wyoming's Heart Mountain Relocation Camp: Imprisonment of Our Brothers

Maybe I'm just mad at the world lately, but I don't understand how people can go to Heart Mountain and say, "Wow, look what they have done". I went there and said, "This is all they've done?" How can anyone go to Heart Mountain and say that it was not a concentration camp? Did the Japanese-Americans ask to go here? While they where there were they Americans? I think not. Were they Japanese? No, they were "Japs", the enemy. They had their rights and freedoms taken away. They where forced to leave their homes, friends and lives.

Maybe it's because I grew up hearing stories from my Great Uncle Pue about living in a POW camp in Germany. At least he was there because he was fighting in a WAR. The Japanese-Americans that were forced in to these camps at: Amache, Colorado Gila River, Arkansas; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Jerome, Arkansas; Manzanar, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Poston, Arizona; Rohwer, Arkansas; Topaz, Utah; and Tula Lake, California they "might" know something. Because they looked different, dressed different, and talked different, they were forced to live in a place that didn't feed them well, didn't house them well and were guarded by their countrymen who had orders to shoot them.

I don't know any American that would put up with that today. Yet we haven't done anything to help our fellow Americans that were put in such places. We think a cute little walkway and a few educational signs are the best we can do? I don't think so. We should rebuild a few of the houses that the "enemy" lived in and school children should spend a few days living there. Going there, walking around and getting back on a nice warm bus is not going to teach anyone anything. If you really want to make sure that this will never happen again, make the youth of today suffer a little. Make us live like our Japanese brothers and sisters had to live. Feed us 45-cents worth of food a day.

No one ever learned anything by reading it in a book or walking around on a nice path. Of course, that will never happen. We can't treat children like that, but more then once in our Country's history we have. What are we going to do to make sure it won't happen to the Arabs that live in America as citizens? We are at war with them. I know some Arabs that were taken by armed soldiers and held at Army camps. No, this did not happen in the Middle East, but in Detroit, Michigan. Who is going to stop the Military from doing it to the Korean-Americans when we go to war with North Korea? Oh don't tell me we won't, because I know we are going to. Americans seem to think that "it" will never happen again. "Times have changed; we've learned form our mistakes". Have we? No, we haven't and we never will unless we learn, really learn, not with this cute little 4^th grade field trip to the "Relocation Camps". Until we start calling them by what they really were we are bound to make the same mistakes.