The restoration and maintenance of Camp Amache, the internment camp in southeastern Colorado where 7,597 Japanese-Americans were forced to move during World War II, will be a primary topic during National Park Service hearings today in Denver.
The Park Service is also expected to hear comments about the Heart Mountain internment camp near Cody, Wyo.
In December, Congress established a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to restore the 10 camps across the United States that housed Japanese-Americans forced from the West Coast in the early 1940s.
Camp Amache was the smallest of the 10 relocation centers, while Heart Mountain saw almost 11,000 people between August 1942 and November 1945.
Mary A. Bomar, the director of the National Park Service, said a series of public hearings – to be held in Denver; Glendale, Ariz.; Salt Lake City; Seattle; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and Sacramento, Calif. – will allow public input and give Park Service officials the opportunity to answer questions about the criteria that will guide the multimillion-dollar program.
“The stories and struggles around national security and the protection of civil liberties associated with these confinement sites continues to resonate today,” Bomar said. “This is a great opportunity for people across the country to provide their thoughts about this new program and what criteria should be used to evaluate future grant proposals.”
In 1941, nearly 113,000 people of Japanese ancestry were living in California, Washington and Oregon. On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and a little more than two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order empowering the Army to remove certain people from excluded areas.
About 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved to the notorious inland compounds, and received little in the way of compensation from the government for the goods, businesses and property they lost. In 1988, the government agreed to pay $1.65 billion in reparations to 81,000 surviving camp inmates.
Camp Amache, also known as the Granada Relocation Center, is near Granada.
At its peak, the relocation camp contained 30 blocks of residential barracks, each with its own mess hall, laundry and shower rooms. Children attended school, while adults worked on farms growing crops such as alfalfa and corn.
Today, grass grows over the barracks foundations. A small memorial and the camp cemetery are all that remain.
Several hundred young men held at Amache volunteered for the U.S. Army, and 31 were killed serving with the highly decorated 442nd regiment combat unit, composed entirely of Japanese-Americans.
In recent years, the townspeople of Granada along with various civic groups in Colorado have tried to clean up the Amache camp site and maintain the cemetery.
In 2006, then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton designated the Amache site a National Historic Landmark.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or firstname.lastname@example.org
Share your ideas
Today: The National Park Service Intermountain Regional Office hosts a discussion about restoration and maintenance of World War II Japanese internment camps.
Time: 1:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
Site: Tri-State Denver Buddhist Temple, 1947 Lawrence St.