Eleven weeks after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066
which essentially said that the army had a right to exclude anybody
from a area that they considered a military zone.
Unfortunately the entire West Coast was deemed a military zone
and by May of '42 they started a wholesale evacuation of the
ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast.
This is the site of the oldest Japanese language school in San Francisco.
This became one of the places where the all the Japanese came to be registered
so the military knew exactly how many in the family
and how many people would be leaving the area.
Dorothea Lange was hired by the government to photograph and record the history.
She captures the agony that the people were going through.
Many of her photos were impounded by the government because they appeared to be too sympathetic
and what was happening to these Americans of Japanese ancestry.
120,000 of them were sent to internment camps.
2/3 of the people were born in the U.S. They were American citizens.
They were each issued a manila tag that had their name,
their locations of their camp and each family had their own
serial number issued by the U.S. government.
For my project labor, I was able to order new tags
made in the same dimension.
I had a database from the National Archives probably about that high.
I had volunteers write them and stamp them and tie them.
We created a hundred and twenty thousand tags to represent every single
man, woman, and child that was forced into each camp.
The tags would rotate very slowly and then sometimes you can
hear the paper rustling so it's almost like
the spirits of all these people were speaking to us.
Eight of the camps were in the desert. Two of them were in the swamps of Arkansas.
The well-known painter Chiura Obata went to the authorities and he said
you take people out of their daily lives and you put them in this one square mile
ten thousand people in a square mile, they're gonna go crazy.
Let me start an arts program.
He managed to talk artists into teaching classes
and if you had a skill, people would say could you teach me how to do this?
These were not professional artists. They were farmers and fishermen.
I knew that all of my family had been in the camps
but my parents never talked about it. The community never talked about it
so I really didn't know what this was all about until I happened to discover this
bird pin that my mother had in the garage and I just liked it.
I thought it was a nice piece of jewelry so I started wearing it
and one day somebody asked me where I got the pin and I said
oh you know I think it was made in camp and I thought
you know what else was made in camp?
Two of the camps, Tule Lake in Northern California and Topaz in Utah
were over ancient seabeds and people did earrings,
table ornaments made out of shells that they picked up.
These groups would get together and they'd do it as a little club.
People didn't just make floral pins.
They were very fond of the Disney characters.
They used fingernail polish and other types of poster paint
to decorate the characters.
People would make memory books and had their friends write inscriptions.
This one is carved and it's decorated.
At all of the camps, people made bird pins.
They used fruit crates for material.
They got their hands on a National Geographic issue on birds
and they tried to be as authentic as possible in how they carved it and how they painted it
I started thinking about why this was so meaningful
It was because the objects reflected the dignity of the people who were in camp.
When you saw these amazing things that they created out of nothing
there was a respect for their unwillingness to just give up and give in.
What I really came to admire about them was that they were looking for beauty
in a place where other people wouldn't see that.
What the people who were in camp said to me was it was just our way to
gaman and gaman is a word that means to bear the seemingly unbearable
with patience and dignity.
They'd say we had to gaman, what else could we do, we had to gaman.
My mother is Momo Nagano.
She was fifteen when she went into camp in Manzanar.
They were hiring the incarcerated Japanese Americans to create
camouflage for the war effort.
There was nothing to do so she wanted to have a job.
They would create a piece of camouflage by weaving strips through netting.
She said it always stayed with her because she just really enjoyed the process.
She did ultimately become a weaver.
I found this picture taken by Dorothea Lange and there are five women but
one is standing there just kind of focusing in on what she's doing.
I swear it's my mother.
There's just something about the way she's standing there and the way
she's really working on the weaving part.
Many Japanese Americans had parents who did not talk about the internment experience.
It was a source of great shame and humiliation and embarrassment
but our mother spoke very freely about it and we were hearing stories about
camp from when we were, you know, very little.
My mother was willing to walk her own path through this life
and her approach to life was really reflected in her artwork.
The flag is woven with strips of cloth through a netting that she created.
She collected the names of every family that lived in her neighborhood
and put them on the stripes.
In the blue field it's all the camp names
and the 30th Street was her street that she lived on in Los Angeles.
The shape is a tombstone to symbolize the death of her neighborhood
For centuries Asian Americans have been faced with this
questioning of their American-ness.
Because you have this face you are the perpetual foreigner
even though your family may have been here for five, six generations.
One of the great ironies of the internment experience is that
many of these Japanese Americans never lost their love
for their country you know they love the United States from behind barbed wire.
Our parents made the best out of a bad situation
and they didn't talk about it not just because it was hard for them
but they wanted to spare us children.
They wanted us to grow up loving this country.
I realized that that silence was not meant to harm us but to to protect us.