#Funter bay internment camp cemetery free#

He also publishes an Asian American newspaper, and is the editor of the Nichi Bei Times and its successor Nichi Bei Weekly. Kenji also started two dozen programs centered around Asian American studies and social justice on the California State University Sacramento campus. Kenji helped organize exhibits on the resisters. Taguma is the son of Amache resister Noboru Taguma. Dan has been active in Asian American studies and helped to establish the Yu-Ai Kai Japanese American Community Senior Services. Dan Kubo is the son of Amache resister Yosh Kubo.This panel included two men whose own activism was influenced by their fathers’ resistance at the Amache camp: The Site serves as a lasting reminder of the need to protect civil liberties, especially in times of crisis. The Amache resisters reunited at the Tucson prison site in 1999 at the dedication of the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site. Fellow draft resister and civil rights icon Gordon Hirabayashi was also incarcerated in this labor camp. The Amache resisters were sentenced to a federal labor camp in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona. Now we know that at the same time, three dozen men at the Amache concentration camp made individual decisions to resist the draft. The Heat Mountain Fair Play Committee was the most well known draft resistance organization for some time.

The resisters refused to be drafted from behind barbed wire while they and their families were imprisoned without due process. Although initially the JACL omitted the resisters’ stories from the chronicles of Japanese American history, the resisters today are hailed as civil rights heroes. Later, stories and research about the Amache resistance led to the JACL’s recognition of the resisters. The local and national Japanese American Citizens Leagues ostracized the resisters during the war. This panel examined the resistance at the Granada concentration camp (also known as “Amache”) in Colorado. “Resistance at Amache and the Road to Recognition was a panel discussion held at the Tadaima 2021 virtual community pilgrimage. But what about resistance at other camps?

#Funter bay internment camp cemetery free#

Over the last 20 years films such as “Conscience and the Constitution” and “Rabbit in the Moon,” and books like Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II” have raised awareness of organized resistance to the draft imposed upon young men imprisoned at the Heart Mountain concentration camp. It now moves to the Alaska Senate.Resistance at Amache and the Road to Recognition The House passed the bill 29-4 last week. 'The descendants of the families who are buried there had some real anxiety about whether they would always have access to be able to visit the graves of their family,' said Hannan. But the Juneau Democrat said she wanted to ensure it would remain open to the public by adding it and surrounding lands to the nearby Funter Bay park.

Sara Hannan said the cemetery is already on state-owned land managed by the Department of Natural Resources. 'The value of protecting the social and historical significance of this land will cement the history for good, and we will never have to repeat this history again,' he said.īill sponsor Rep. Stepetin was testifying in support of House Bill 122, which would expand Funter Bay State Marine Park by about 250 acres to include the historic cemetery. 'Even my grandma used to say, late into her late 90s, things like, 'I hope it never happens again,'' he said. Martin Stepetin told the committee that all four of his grandparents spent the war at Funter Bay in miserable conditions. More than 1,000 miles away from their ancestral home in the Pribilofs, the Unangax̂ had to make do with few provisions and little heat in a shuttered salmon cannery. 'I think it's very important in terms of the state of Alaska protecting the Unangax̂ historic cemetery site,' Monteith told the House Resources Committee. George Island were relocated to southeast Alaska in a makeshift camp on Admiralty Island.Īround 30 marked graves remain near the shores of Funter Bay, which descendants continue to visit. University of Alaska Southeast anthropology associate professor Daniel Monteith told lawmakers last month that 290 residents of St. authorities forcibly evacuated more than 800 Unangax̂ from nine villages in the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands ahead of the Japanese advance. Alaska lawmakers are considering expanding a state park to include the historic graves of Unangan people who died during the evacuation of World War II.Īfter the Japanese bombed Unalaska in 1942, U.S.