In the vast Idaho desert, children go to school beside rattlesnakes and sagebrush lizards. Their school buildings, like their homes, are bare, makeshift buildings made with pine wood and covered with tar paper. Dry, relentless winds blow stifling dust through cracks in wooden walls. Even with the vastness of this barren desert environment, barbed wire encircles the residents of the area, confining them to the quarters of the internment camp. These were imprisoned Japanese Americans in 1942, and they were not allowed to leave.
Japanese internment during World War 2 is often seen as one of the most appalling civil rights violations the US committed in that century. In reaction to the paranoia and anti-Japanese sentiment caused by the 1942 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 – calling for forcible removal of people deemed as a “threat to national security” from the West Coast to camps further inland. While not explicitly targeting a particular group, the order became the basis to label all people of Japanese descent in states such as California, Washington, and Oregon “threats.” Residents of these states, not only people with Japanese citizenship but also US citizens with Japanese ancestry – no matter how far back it traced – were given as little as ten days to pack up their belongings and move.
Some lucky families were able to find friends to take care of their homes and valuable belongings while they were gone for an indefinite amount of time. Many more, however, had no one to rely on or no time to arrange anything. Most lost all their belongings barring basic necessities packed in suitcases. They lost their homes, livelihoods, and invaluable possessions with no predictable time frame of when (or if) they would ever return.
Camps were typically set up on plots of barren, dusty, and arid, and therefore unused federal land. Hundreds of acres were set aside for each camp, and a total of 120,000 people across the country were shoved inside, surrounded by fences and armed soldiers. The Minidoka prison camp in Idaho was one of 10 major internment camps set up in the US.
Residents of these camps were subjected to cramped and unfurnished quarters, uncleanliness and filth, bad food, and inadequate education. They shared one small room with numerous members of their extended family, used communal latrines, ate in mess halls, and attended school without any supplies. It was a sharp shift from Japanese-American culture that had valued private family time and traditions to a complete, utter lack of privacy. Often, the inhabitants had to survive on meager portions of stale bread. Their children learned math and physics in laundry rooms of other buildings, lacking textbooks, paper, blackboards, or any other supplies.
Despite the hardships of life in the camps, Japanese Americans built their own communities within the wire. They established their own markets, churches, newspapers, and health clinics. They planted gardens, constructed ice rinks and baseball fields, and even put in place fire and police departments. High school-aged children sometimes participated in sports teams and clubs, led student councils, and went to prom. A thousand Minidoka incarcerees fought in the 442nd Infantry Regiment during the war, which would go on to be the most decorated combat regiment in the entire war. Their lives had been exceptionally disrupted and changed for the worse, but that did not stop them from continuing to live, adapt, and succeed.
Almost eight decades later, survivors of the concentration camps and their descendants feel very close ties to these places. Lots of them see Minidoka as a place of healing, containing still unresolved trauma that must be addressed. These sites are something sacred to the people who were forced inside – the people who made something out of nothing and managed to make these camps theirs.
Now, Magic Valley Energy wants to build a wind farm close to the site of Minidoka. This windy portion of the desert has the capability of powering hundreds of thousands of homes with renewable energy, but Japanese-American residents of Oregon and Idaho are opposed to the idea. Survivors who were just small children when they arrived at the camp for the first time often go back to visit, and are moved because they’re able to take in the landscape that their parents saw upon arrival. Julie Abo, the daughter of a Minidoka incarceree, says while visiting, it was very important to her “thinking of [her] mother being there, looking out, and living in that land and experiencing that land the way [she] was experiencing it, too.” Wind turbines would mar the landscape and destroy the sanctity of the prisoners’ experience. For a land so sacred to the Japanese American community, the wind farm would irreversibly alter their memory of the past.
It would also lessen the control that the Japanese community has on their history. After incarceration camps were closed, communities fought long and hard against the US government to demand reparations (which came in 1988, 42 years later). The fundamental change of such an important land makes many descendants feel like their past is in the hands of white government officials, just as it was back then. Paul Tomita lived in Minidoka when he was 4 years old. He asks of the situation, “If Minidoka was a white memorial to white soldiers who died in whatever war it is, do you think that they would offer free land to Lava Ridge to develop their windmills there? Hell no.”
With the staunch opposition of many Japanese American communities, a decision by the Bureau of Land Management is awaited. If approved, construction would start in 2025 and operations in 2026. While the renewable energy provided would undoubtedly be a great step in getting rid of fossil fuel reliance, it would damage an essential part of the identities of hundreds of thousands of people beyond repair.