Images of Minidoka National Historic Site – Southern Idaho, taken in June 2018.

On February 19, 1942, just over two months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order which mandated that over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the U.S., two-thirds of which were American Citizens and half were children, be interned in “War Relocation Centers”. Minidoka National Historic Site maintains the remnants of this camp as a memorial to those who were imprisoned here.

We preserve places like Minidoka, or the Dachau and Auschwitz Concentration Camps in Germany so that we always remember what prejudice, racism and bigotry can drive us to do if it goes unchecked. These are monuments to man’s inhumanity to man and how ignorance becomes an easy excuse to enslave, incarcerate or condemn those which we don’t know or don’t attempt to understand. These places are preserved to make sure we remember our past mistakes in hopes we will never repeat them. Surely since the Second World War we have learned something about prejudice and how to better and more humanely treat our fellow man…or have we?