Its location between two mountain ranges is astonishingly beautiful, but also quite remote and hard to get to, in the sense that “out of sight” is also “out of mind” when it came to temporarily disappearing an entire population of American citizens during the war.  The exhibitions at the visitors center will convey both the violation of civil rights that Japanese internment represents in U.S. history but also the everyday acts of resistance that Japanese Americans engaged in, from the overt resistance of the No-No boys to the more subtle resistance embodied in the beautiful gardens that camp prisoners built to resist their own dehumanization.  You can learn more about how to visit at https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm and if you want some helpful listening along the drive, check out Codeswitch’s episode America’s Concentration Camps.  For more in-depth reading and historical context, check out One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.  And if you are traveling with kids, here is a helpful roundup of books by the blog Pragmatic Mom.  Or explore the ideas through fiction with Samira Ahmed’s dystopian children’s book imagining the internment of Muslim Americans entitled Internment. The film Farewell to Manzanar is worth a viewing.  And if you want to be inspired by stories of organizing and resistance, get a copy of The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations.  An internet search on #neveragainisnow will connect you to current struggles to protect the civil liberties of vulnerable populations in the U.S. right now.

Image credit: Original watercolor by Jennifer R. Myhre ©2019