Manzanar teaches about Japanese American incarceration in the US. That's in jeopardy under Trump

The Guardian

2 days ago

At the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than 200 miles (320km) outside Los Angeles, in what feels like the middle of nowhere, is Manzanar national historic site. It marks the place where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the second world war, crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights, and patrolled by military police.
Since then, Manzanar, which now has a museum and reconstructed barracks that visitors can walk through, has been transformed into a popular pilgrimage destination for Japanese Americans to remember and teach others about this history. (Manzanar was one of 10 concentration camps where the US government forcibly relocated and held more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent during the second world war.)
But recently, under the direction of the Trump administration, National Park Service (NPS) employees have hung new signs at Manzanar that historians and community advocates say will undermine these public education efforts. The notices encourage visitors to report 'any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features' via a QR code. The signs, which have been posted at all national parks, monuments and historic sites, were displayed in support of Donald Trump's executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.
Historians, national park advocates and community leaders say they're alarmed by the move, in what they see as the most recent example of the Trump administration's attempt to 'whitewash' US history.
'Any attempt to constrain or sanitize the stories that are told at Manzanar should concern every American,' said Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, an organization that documents the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were held in concentration camps. 'I'm incredibly disappointed that this is happening in the United States because museums, monuments and memorials are public spaces where we can explore difficult history, confront our past, engage with what's uncomfortable and then be able to imagine the future that we want to collectively share.'
Earlier this year, government agencies compiled hundreds of words to be erased from federal recognition such as 'diversity', 'cultural heritage', 'marginalized', 'racial inequality' and 'ethnicity'.
'I think the sign is clearly trying to create a chilling effect in the telling of these stories,' said Dennis Arguelles, the southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, which supports national parks and opposes planned changes to alter historical facts. 'These are moments in our history and it's very dangerous for us to try to pretend it didn't happen.'
The NPS, which has already been under pressure due to funding cuts, hiring freezes and forced resignations, has a legal mandate to preserve, protect and interpret American history. By posting the new signs across all 433 parks, monuments and historic sites, park visitors can act as government informants, although Arguelles said he has heard anecdotally that people have used the QR code to express support for Manzanar and ask that the administration let park rangers do their jobs.
NPS units have been tasked with reviewing all 'inappropriate content' on display by 18 July, and parks will receive direction about what to do with it by 18 August.
Arguelles said that fears of public education at Manzanar being stifled are not unfounded. The park service has already stripped the contributions of transgender people from the Stonewall national monument's website. And the US army deleted a webpage dedicated to the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the nation's most decorated military unit, which was composed of thousands of Japanese Americans whose families were forcibly incarcerated by their own government. After public outcry, the page was partially restored.
The Trump administration has also threatened funding for colleges and universities offering ethnic studies programs as part of their DEI purge. Cultural institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum that focus on education, culture and storytelling have lost grants (some have since been temporarily restored). Among the cuts was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that funded a workshop that helped teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration that benefitted roughly 20,000 students a year.
'As a historian, you can see a pendulum swing between a very narrow and exclusive vision of America as a white Christian nation and a more open, multi-ethnic America,' said Duncan Ryūken Williams, director of the University of Southern California's Shinso Ito Center and co-founder of of the Irei Project, which, for the first time, compiled the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were unjustly incarcerated during the second world war. 'We're obviously in one part of that spectrum now.'
The preservation of this part of Japanese American history is about more than remembering the past. In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act – the very law that served as the basis for some of the arrests and roundups of Japanese Americans during the second world war – against Venezuelan nationals as young as 14 whom the administration claims are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In cases challenging the executive order, every judge except one has found the Trump administration's use of the act to deport people without due process to be illegal.
When the US last invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it began a period of escalation that resulted in the supreme court deferring to unsubstantiated claims from the executive branch, which led to everyday people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, losing their families, jobs, homes and freedoms. (It wasn't just the Alien Enemies Act; most people of Japanese descent were detained, under the auspices of martial law in Hawaii and otherwise under Executive Order 9066.)
Williams said that, like today, the way the Alien Enemies Act was used during the second world war was prejudicial since people of Japanese heritage were seen at the time as being 'unassimilable racially and religiously', recalling racist tropes from the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
'Currently, we are seeing people being picked up and detained and moved immediately away from their families,' said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of 60 Asian American organizations that filed an amicus brief supporting the fight against Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act. 'We're hearing reports of even green card holders having been deported without any process, without a hearing. It's really, really disturbing.'
She connects the lack of due process many immigrants are experiencing today to what most Japanese Americans experienced during the second world war. 'This is the same playbook,' Kohli said. 'The government suppressed evidence and made false claims to justify incarceration in WWII and today's administration is doing the same thing. They're invoking this law with no evidence.'
While it remains to be seen how the courts will rule on the Alien Enemies Act and how the NPS will handle complying with the administration's orders about the content at sites like Manzanar, Japanese American community organizations are determined to teach the lessons of the past to show how quickly civil liberties can be taken away, particularly for communities of color.
'The slogan Make America Great Again is sort of calling back to the past that didn't exist,' said Densho's Kawamura. 'We're going to do our best to protect and safeguard this history so that young people still have access to it even if the federal government itself is making it more difficult for us to do our work.'