While Kris Kobach makes his plan to reinstate a registry of Muslims and "add extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens" and further attack voting rights, another prominent Donald Trump supporter is claiming the precedent for all this in the World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps. It's pure serendipity that against this backdrop, Idahoans are reflecting on that very dark chapter and an internment camp here in southern Idaho with an exhibit at the Boise Art Museum.
A paper sculpture installation titled "The Tag Project," by artist Wendy Maruyama, forces visitors to confront the scale of the mass internment. Ten paper pillars, each made up of masses of paper identification tags corresponding to individuals confined in the camps, hang ghostlike from the ceiling. There are 120,000 tags in all.[…]
Three other artists featured in the show are painters who lived through the incarceration experience. Roger Shimomura, a professor emeritus at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas, was a toddler in the camp. His acrylic paintings and prints are bold and bright, focused on people and accompanied by a personal memory or snippet of relevant history. One of Shimomura's paintings, Furlough No. 2, recounts the history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—a unit of Japanese-American soldiers who joined the military while family and friends were interned. The group became the most decorated for its size and duration of service. In the painting, Shimomura presents a man in uniform staring from behind barbed wire—a soldier imprisoned on his home soil.
Artwork from inside the camps is more muted. The paintings of Takuichi Fujii and Kenjiro Nomura are rendered in subtle blue, green and brown hues, drawing on the high desert where the Minidoka camp once stood along Clover Creek.
Nomura's paintings of the camps and barracks frequent clouds that cast heavy shadows on the scene. One of Fujii's paintings, titled Minidoka Montage with Fence and Landmarks, contrasts the camp landscape with inner turmoil: barracks, guard towers, barbed wire and trees tumble into one another as if dislodged by an earthquake.
Nearly 9,400 Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to this camp, one of 10. Americans. In prison camps as national security risks while many of their sons and brothers were fighting totalitarianism for our country. That's what the Trump team thinks is great precedent for a new bout of institutionalized racism and oppression.
BAM Executive Director Melanie Fales: "We decided that this story needed to be told. … It's so important on a local level—but also on a national level—when we're talking about the domination of one group of people over another. We've all heard that so many times you want to make sure history doesn't repeat itself, and you can only do that if you know what the history was." That's precisely what visitors to the exhibit take out of it, one writing in the log book that it "worries me that it could possibly occur again for other groups. Groups who are surrounded by hatred, just like the Japanese once were."
We know what this history was and we see it happening again. We have no other option but to fight it.