ASSOCIATED PRESS / JULY 9
An honor guard from the American Legion Post No. 41 in Wendell, Idaho, prepares for a rifle salute as a giant “koinobori,” or tent flag, flutters in the wind in a final rite of the Minidoka pilgrimage at the Minidoka National Historic Site in Jerome. Idaho.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / JULY 9
Minidoka survivor Jerry Arai bows his head in prayer at the final rite of the Minidoka pilgrimage to the Minidoka National Historic Site.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / JULY 9
Paul Tomita, Minidoka survivor and member of the pilgrimage plans committee, right, presents a crown of origami cranes to Hubert B. Two Leggins, an original member of the Black Lodge District’s Whistling Water Clan, after a blessing of the final rite for the Minidoka pilgrimage at the Minidoka National Historic Site in Jerome, Idaho.
ASSOCIATED PRESS / JULY 9
A player attaches an “ema”, a plaque used to write prayers or vows at Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples, to a symbol made of barbed wire.
JEROME, Idaho >> Behind the barbed wire, the boy pressed his ink-covered index finger onto the mint green card to get out. And he took a picture of his frightened face.
Pablo Tomita, four years.
It was July 4, 1943, Independence Day in Minidoka, a camp in the vast Idaho desert where more than 13,000 men, women and young men of Japanese descent were incarcerated during World War II. for security reasons due to their ancestry.
The wallet-sized piece of paper meant the frightened boy in the photo could leave after 11 months of living in a cramped bunkhouse with his father, mother, two sisters and grandmother.
Eight decades later, he returned with the West Coast pilgrims who deserve to be remembered for this life-changing atrocity. But now another government resolution emerges as a new threat: a wind mission that pilgrims worry could destroy the experience they need to preserve.
If approved through the Bureau of Land Management, the Lava Ridge wind farm would install 400 wind turbines in 118 square miles near Minidoka, where survivors say they are witnessing an attempt to bury the past.
“If Minidoka were a white memorial to the white infantrymen who died in any war, do you think they would be offering loose land on Lava Ridge to expand their windmills?Tomita said. Surely not. “
The Desert Camp
Two months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
Approximately 120,000 more people of Japanese descent were uprooted from their homes and imprisoned in camps as a potential threat to the United States.
Thousands of others were elderly, disabled, young or babies. Desperate families sold their belongings and packed what they could. The lucky ones had white friends who tended to homes, farms, and businesses.
In Minidoka, they lived in wooden barracks covered with tar paper, braving the heat of summer and the cold of winter in 50 square miles of growing, isolated desert. In small spaces, with little privacy, women waited until night to use the latrines. Up to eight family members shared rooms in cots without mattresses. At Christmas dinner, the children ate hot dogs.
Under armed guard towers, Minidoka residents worked in fields cultivating crops for little pay. But they built a community in what was essentially a prison camp.
They organized churches and planted gardens. They created a kind of city with shops, watch and radio repair shops, a fitness clinic, a hair salon, an ice rink, a swimming pool, and a baseball field.
Today, few original structures recall a break in U. S. history that the government struggled to erase before granting reparations and designating the fields as national historic sites decades ago. late.
Today, a new commission has been assigned with fences of a different kind for the gigantic public land dotted with sagebrush and trap grass.
Proposed Wind Project
As the Biden administration sought to fight the climate update by allowing 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands over the decade, a company called Magic Valley announced a wind farm that would be the second-largest in the U. S. It would produce up to 1,000 megawatts.
Lava Ridge would build towering wind turbines in parts of 3 counties and double Idaho’s wind power generation.
“There is an enormous, market-based need for empty power in Idaho and throughout the West. . . demanded through utilities, businesses, heads of state, and indeed many Americans seeking to lead this country toward independence from power. ” said Luke Papez, assignment manager at Magic Valley, a subsidiary of New York-based LS Power. “It’s very smart to locate an assignment. “
With global warming, wind farms have been touted as a way to boost economic activity, generate new local tax revenues, and a critical tool for the White House’s blank power goals.
“Renewable wind projects are a critical component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to fight climate change, sell blank air and water for our current and long-term generations, create thousands of good-paying union jobs, and begin our nation’s transition to a blank country. the long-term power,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
Magic Valley now hopes to gain BLM approval in 2024, break ground on structure in 2025, and begin operating through 2026.
But opposition is nearly universal in the high desert where the company would build hundreds of miles of temporary fencing and roads, plus hundreds of concrete slabs for turbines.
There are fears the isolated landscape that draws travelers will be permanently scarred, explosives used for construction will damage an aquifer — and the project will cast shadows on the desert Minidoka survivors visit.
As the BLM nears a final decision, Minidoka survivors and descendants claim it is a healing position that commemorates the traumas their families are still suffering to unravel and resolve.
“I have no goal of taking sides in history,” said Idaho Republican Rep. Jack Nelson. “But the explanation we examine history is to never do those things again. “
The boy in the photo
During his 11 months at the desert camp, Paul Tomita longed for his Seattle home surrounded by lush greenery. He asked his mother: What did we do wrong to end up here? When are we going home?
“Of course, my mom had to sing and dance around,” recalls Tomita, now 84. “Even though I was so young, I knew something was wrong. “
Tomita’s circle of relatives and thousands of other Japanese Americans were under the supervision of the Army’s War Relocation Authority. “They told us when we could eat, when we could sleep, when we could do anything,” she said.
The lingering dust in his bachelor room worsened his asthma and sent him to the hospital barracks.
When thick desert dust blew through holes in the walls of the family barracks, his mother dipped the newspapers in water to cover the larger ones, but the curtains dried and collapsed.
“Dust on your face, dust in your ears, dust up your nose, dust in your mouth,” Tomita recalled.
Over time, Tomita said, the U. S. infantrymen on the other side of the barbed wire knew that Japanese Americans in Minidoka posed a threat. “Even if we pass through barriers,” he said, “where will we go through to get through?
Never Forget
While Tomita’s family was incarcerated, his father worked for a job on the East Coast in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
Their mission: to translate U. S. propaganda into Japanese pamphlets asking to be dropped in the South Pacific.
To return to life outside, Tomita, his older sister and his younger sister, then 2, needed a leave card with a fingerprint and photo.
At the end of the war, the family returned to Seattle, where neighbors had maintained typographic apparatus that allowed them to revive the family printing business.
When the children entered high school, their mother would show them her Minidoka exit card.
After earning a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from Oregon State University, Tomita provided counseling and rehabilitation to businesses and government agencies on the West Coast. He and his wife followed a daughter, who is now 53 and has a son of her own.
In July, Tomita brought a copy of her departure card when she returned to camp for an annual pilgrimage. He needs the next generations to stop at this precious place for Japanese Americans.
“Because they dumped us there,” he said. “Like it or not, it is our sacred land.”
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