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How to pronounce wyomingite in English?

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- The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center
between Cody and Powell does an excellent job
of preserving sights and artifacts
and documenting experiences of those
who were confined here during World War II.
- This is the sight where my grandmother's family
was held during World War II on the basis of their race.
- The legacy of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center
through our present day lands,
with Northwest College Instructor Aura Newlin.
Next, on Wyoming Chronicle
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- [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided in part
by the Wyoming Public Television Endowment
and viewers like you.
- Hi, my name is Aura Newlin.
I am a fourth generation Japanese-American.
I'm also a fourth generation Wyomingite.
And I am also a faculty member
at Northwest College in Powell.
I teach anthropology and sociology.
Today we are at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center,
halfway between Cody and Powell.
It is the original historic site
of the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp, as it was called,
where approximately 14,000, at its peak,
Japanese immigrants and their American born children
were held against their will during World War II
on the basis of their race.
And this is the site where my grandmother's family
was held during World War II on the basis of their race.
My relatives came from Japan to Wyoming
in the early 1900s.
They settled here, they raised their families here,
they were laundry workers, they were coal miners,
they were railroaders in this great state of Wyoming.
And on one side of my family,
my grandmother's side of the family,
after spending their lifetimes in Wyoming,
30 years approximately,
their family moved to Hollywood, California,
and then, in a twist of irony,
were sent back to Wyoming
following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
There were about 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry
or persons of Japanese ancestry
who were affected by this evacuation order.
It is a little bit odd
for someone to be a fourth generation Japanese-American
and a fourth generation Wyomingite,
because most of the time
when we think of Japanese-Americans in Wyoming
we think of people who were originally in California
and were sent here to Heart Mountain, Wyoming
against their will because of their Japanese ancestry,
and then most of them left after the war years as well.
My relatives came from Japan straight to Wyoming
on both sides of my family.
So on my grandmother's side of the family,
her parents came from Japan to Wyoming in the early 1900s,
my great grandfather was a railroader
for the Union Pacific Railroad,
and my grandma used to say that all of us kids,
seven of them in total,
were born all up and down the railroad
between Cheyenne, Wyoming and Ogden, Utah.
My great grandfather was a section foreman on the railroad
so he took care of the tracks between one stop and the next.
And so while he and his wife were Japanese immigrants,
their children were American born citizens,
and they had a good life in Wyoming.
They loved it here, he spent his whole career here,
and after 30 years on the railroad,
he retired and moved the family to Hollywood, California.
And on the corner of Sunset Boulevard
and Hollywood Boulevard,
he set up a grocery store
that he actually named the Wyoming Grocery
because they loved Wyoming so much.
That was their home in this country.
And so he poured all of the family savings
into the Wyoming Grocery in Hollywood, California,
and just when they were starting
to get settled in their new life,
Pearl Harbor was bombed,
and as my grandmother says,
another kind of bomb fell on the Japanese-Americans
who lived on the west coast.
President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066
that authorized the forced removal
of all persons of Japanese ancestry
from an exclusion zone that blanketed the west coast
of the United States.
They were removed from their homes
and sent to a total of ten camps
throughout the United States.
And so as irony would have it,
my relatives, who were originally in Wyoming,
got taken from their new home in Hollywood
and sent back to Wyoming, of all places,
and were confined at Heart Mountain here on this site.
That's my grandmother's side of the family.
My grandfather's side of the family,
they also came straight from Japan to Wyoming
in the early 1900s.
My great grandfather, himself,
worked in the laundry business,
he ran the Green River Laundry and Dry Cleaning Business,
and like on the other side of the family,
his children were born in Wyoming.
So they were all American born citizens
and Wyomingites from the start.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed,
my grandfather was then old enough to be working
and he, himself, was working on the Union Pacific Railroad.
Because his family was in Wyoming and not on the coast,
they were not subject to Executive Order 9066.
So they were not forced to leave their homes.
However, quite apart from government action,
the Union Pacific Railroad, as an industry,
as a corporation, made the decision
to fire all of its Japanese-American employees.
So my grandfather, along with the other workers,
were laid off of their jobs.
And for them, that meant that they also lost their housing,
because most of the railroaders lived in railroad housing.
So although they were not forced away from their homes
in the way that my grandmother's family was,
they suffered greatly.
My grandfather's family actually had their own place
because they had businesses outside of the railroad,
but they ended up housing other Japanese-American families
who had nowhere to go
when they were booted out of their homes
in February in Wyoming.
I have an amazing letter, a draft of a letter, I suppose,
that my grandfather wrote
to the president of the Union Pacific Railroad
following the firing
of all of the Japanese-American employees,
and it's eloquently written,
it is...
it has a really powerful tone to it
in its lack of antagonism, I suppose,
and he strongly but gently argues
that it was wrong to fire everybody
just on the basis of their ancestry.
Many of us were born in this country,
we've never known any other life,
we love America, we love Wyoming,
and we love our jobs on the Union Pacific Railroad.
We have worked hard for you and none of us are perfect,
but we didn't deserve to be laid off as a whole.
And he sent this letter
to the president of the Union Pacific,
and never got a response back,
but the FBI did come knocking to his door
soon there afterwards in Green River, Wyoming
or maybe Rock Springs, Wyoming,
because this letter must have triggered something in the FBI
and they came and investigated him
for being a possible security threat,
which of course he wasn't.
So that's my grandfather's side of the story,
and there are a lot of other stories that wind in and out,
but that is my connection
both to the Japanese-American experience during World War II
and my connection to this state.
I, myself, was born and raised in Riverton.
I feel a very deep connection to this state
and a very strong pride for Wyoming.
I love Wyoming.
And I'm so happy to be back here working,
my career is here,
and it's made all the more meaningful now
to have this museum on site
that I'm able to be a part of as well.
I'm secretary of the board of directors
of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation
that started building this museum,
and we had its grand opening in 2011.
And here we are in 2017,
a truly world class museum on the site.
So when visitors enter our museum,
we have them start in this area,
which depicts the pre-war lives of Japanese immigrants.
And like I'd mentioned,
most of the stories that are depicted here
are of folks who are on the west coast.
My family's story is atypical
in that my family history is rooted in Wyoming.
But as you can see, there was a thriving community,
and one of the important things to note
is that anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment
had begun long before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
We often think of Pearl Harbor as the impetus
for race-based discrimination
against persons of Japanese Ancestry,
but in reality, there had been both
day-to-day discrimination
and institutionalized discrimination
against the Asian community in California long before that.
This is the entryway to the museum itself.
When you first enter, you see this post
with the sign that was posted all over communities
along the west coast.
Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry.
And it told them where they were to go
to register and to report in in response to the orders
that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
And although this is not my family's grocery store,
this is a grocery store that looked very much like theirs,
and I actually have a picture of the Wyoming Grocery
with a car very much like that in front of it.
And this would have been a typical scene
in the wake of Pearl Harbor in California.
So we encourage people to look at these pre-war years
and then we have this theater space
where we show an introductory film
that gives some of the background to the camp experience.
And beyond getting the introduction to the film,
you go into the museum
and you experience the rest of that through here.
So in this room, we have displays
that help you gain a sense of what life was like
in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor
while people were still in California.
They were told to pack only what they could carry
and so you had to make decisions
about whether you're going to take clothing
or whether you're going to take family photos
and musical instruments or your baseball bat.
You have to make decisions based on what you can carry
when you're going to a place,
you don't know where you're going,
and you don't know how long you'll be there.
So there was a lot of fear and consternation
among the Japanese-American community at that point.
And as you can see some of the headlines of the time,
there was a lot of war hysteria
that fed into this mass removal based on race,
including by people as beloved to us now as Dr. Seuss.
This gives an indication of how widespread
This gives an indication of how widespread
this war hysteria was at the time.
And in hindsight,
it's been acknowledged by the U.S. government
that it was, in fact, racism and war hysteria
that prompted the mass removal.
There was, in fact, no national security threat
posed by Japanese-Americans at the time.
So my relatives who ended up at Heart Mountain,
they were actually on the first train to arrive.
This would've been the location of my relatives' barrack,
in block one, barrack one, B, unit B, I suppose.
And what's interesting about being able to see
on the diorama rather than
just looking at the address listing in the register,
is that on the diorama here, you can see that their barrack
was right next to the exterior fence of the camp,
which was a barbed wire fence,
and it was also right next to the guard tower,
and at least in the beginning years of camp,
at the beginning, these guard towers were staffed
by armed guards with their guns pointed inward.
So I can only imagine how that must have felt
for my relatives to have their imprisonment
so present to them, every time they left their barrack
they would see immediately that they were,
in fact, not free.
Barbed wire, guard tower, gun pointing in at them,
as a constant reminder
of their lack of freedom in this place.
They were on the first train to arrive.
They were also on the last train to leave.
So they were here for the entirety of the camp years.
I mentioned military service,
my great uncle Clarence of course served in the military.
He was drafted.
My grandfather George, who was fired from the railroad,
he also served in the military.
He volunteered as soon as Japanese-Americans
were granted eligibility to serve.
That was his way of showing that he was,
in fact, a patriotic American,
that was his way of showing loyalty to the United States.
And so he, along with many others, volunteered to serve.
My great uncle was drafted and he willingly went,
but there was also a lot of division
within the Japanese-American community
about this question of whether or not to serve
in the military while they were being subject
to what they felt to be an unconstitutional act
and what has since been recognized
as an unconstitutional act.
What started off as a loyalty questionnaire
to determine whether or not someone could be trusted
to serve in the U.S. military.
There was a questionnaire that was given out
that eventually was given to all incarcerees here
as a petition for leave clearance,
and these two questions became a lightning rod
for a lot of the frustrations that had built up during camp.
Question 27, are you willing to serve in the armed forces
of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
And question 28, will you swear unqualified allegiance
to the United States
and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor?
These two questions are poorly written
and difficult to answer in the best of situations.
People were looking at this first question and said,
well, if I answer yes,
that I'm willing to serve in the armed forces,
does that then mean that I'm volunteering to serve?
I don't wanna volunteer.
But if I answer no, will that tag me as disloyal?
So this was an impossible question to answer.
Question 28, for the older generation,
my great grandparent's generation,
they were not allowed to become U.S. citizens by law.
There was no route to citizenship for them.
So if they were to swear allegiance to the United States
and forswear allegiance to Japan,
give up their allegiance to Japan,
even though they wanted to become U.S. citizens,
this question in effect was asking them to become stateless.
They wanted to be U.S. citizens
but the U.S. wouldn't take them,
and so they were not so sure
they wanted to give up allegiance to anywhere.
So for the older generation,
this was an impossible question to answer.
For the younger generation, if they answered
that they would forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor,
that sort of indicated they ever had allegiance
to the Japanese emperor.
These are kids who are as American as apple pie.
They've never known anything other than United States.
A lot of times they outright rejected
any cultural connection to Japan,
just like a lot of teenagers and youth would do now,
they were American through and through,
and so this was a catch 22 for them
because of course they were committed to the United States,
but they had never been committed to the Japanese emperor
and so this would, in effect,
be asking them to admit that they had been.
Most people ended up answering yes, yes, to these questions.
One of my great uncles answered no, no,
and as a result of that,
he was tagged as a traitor and a threat,
and he was segregated to camp called Tule Lake,
which was in California,
which was designated as a segregation center
after this questionnaire was rolled out
and that's where the bad guys were sent
along with their families
and so this ripped the Japanese-American community apart,
it ripped families apart,
and only now are we beginning to recognize
that those who answered no, no
were just as brave, and courageous, and patriotic
as those who served in the military.
And my family has pieces of all of those dynamics in it.
- And Aura Newlin, it's wonderful that you're joining us
here today on Wyoming Chronicle, welcome.
- Thank you.
- You've given us a wonderful tour
of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.
This is something that is fiercely important to you.
But I want to ask you about what people understand
coming to you as an instructor at Northwest College.
You teach about Heart Mountain
and what happens here or what has happened here.
What do your students wonder?
What do they not understand when they first come?
Do they know anything really about Heart Mountain often?
- It's interesting.
I usually poll my students at the beginning of class
before we talk about Heart Mountain and what happened here.
And it seems like I get a mix.
There're certainly always a handful of students who say,
oh yeah, I feel like I've spent
my whole life learning about this.
I went out to the museum in high school
or my elementary school history teacher
taught us about this,
I did Wyoming History Day, maybe,
I've learned a lot about this history.
A handful of students.
Most of the students say,
yeah, I know that there's something out there
but I don't know very much about it,
and I always have a few students,
sometimes local students, even,
and sometimes students from other states who say,
I had no idea that this even happened.
I get a mix.
And for my local students, especially,
it seems to come down to
who they had for high school history
or who they had for middle school social studies
as to whether or not they'd been exposed to this history.
- And as you travel around Wyoming,
I think maybe you could expand that,
not just to students, but to Wyomingites in general.
- Absolutely.
I think beyond the Bighorn Basin
people have a sense that,
yeah, I remember hearing about that at some point
but largely people are unaware of the details,
unaware of the broader context,
and certainly, nationally,
I'm speaking to groups around the country, increasingly,
and a lot of people,
even who consider themselves highly educated
and history buffs, even,
come out alarmed, saying, I had no idea.
I wasn't aware.
- In some of your writings you've written that,
in a sense, sometimes it's perceived as
this is swept under the carpet,
that this facility does a great job
of preserving the relics and the records,
but really not much more than that in most peoples' eyes,
and that it is brushed away.
Why is that?
- I think it's a shameful part of our country's history,
it's a shameful part of our state's history,
and it's kind of a natural human response
to focus on the good and forget about the darker sides
of our history.
The position of this museum and my own position is that
we need to shine a light on history,
both the good sides of it and the bad sides of it,
so that we can learn from that.
And I know it sounds cliché,
but we don't want this to happen again
to another group of people.
And so for me,
the work of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation,
and the work of this museum,
and my work teaching and presenting
to audiences around the country,
is less about preserving this history and less about,
I mean it is about honoring my family's experience
and I think that my grandparent's would be very proud
to know that their story is being shared,
and that means a lot to me,
but for me it's more about using this history
to share with the public
so that the Japanese-American community can be a voice
for other disenfranchised minority groups now
who might not have such a powerful voice,
who might not have the benefit of a historical lens
that helps us as a Japanese-American community to say,
look, we did this 75 years ago,
and it was clearly wrong,
and everybody recognizes that this was wrong, on the whole,
but it's harder to come to the present
and recognize that we similarly shouldn't be too quick
to target other minority groups,
groups who look like the enemy,
just because we are in a state of war
or a state of heightened fear.
We shouldn't have done it in the 1940s
and hopefully we can keep those lessons alive
as we move forward.
- So how would you hope then,
that Wyoming better embraces the legacy then here
at Heart Mountain?
- For me, as someone who is straddling both worlds,
I'm, like I said, a Japanese-American,
but also a through and through Wyomingite,
I see a lot of common ground between the two communities.
I think this experience is often thought of
as a part of Japanese-American history.
It's a history that belongs
to the Japanese-American community,
and so for the non-Japanese-American community,
they say, well that's not my history,
that's not something that's as relevant to me.
But as a Wyomingite, as my family history demonstrates,
this is very much a Wyoming story too.
Wyoming was a part of this camp.
There are interactions that were important
between Japanese-American residents,
like on my grandfather's side,
and residents of the camp, prisoners of the camp.
They did have an impact on the Bighorn Basin
and on the rest of the state.
And I think that I would like to see Wyomingites
embrace this as part of Wyoming history,
not just part of Japanese-American history,
but something that is our collective history
here in Wyoming.
And there are a lot of ways where the two communities
might actually have more things in common
than they have that separate them.
Common themes for instance,
agriculture was one of the huge triumphs
of the community at Heart Mountain.
The incarcerees came to a place that was barren
and they revitalized agriculture at the camp,
and it was one of the huge success stories
of the camp years.
They ended up providing enough produce and meat
for not just the 10,000 people
who were housed here at any one point,
but they also worked on the farms in the surrounding areas
where a lot of the young men were off serving in the war
so the Japanese-Americans who were at Heart Mountain
helped keep the Bighorn Basin alive agriculturally.
So we have this connection,
in Wyoming we are ranchers and farmers
and so were the Japanese-Americans.
As part of Japanese-American culture,
there is a very strong work ethic,
very strong values of respecting your elders
and strong values of education
and I think that all of those are also things that I,
as a Wyomingite, would say.
There are Wyoming values, too.
We care a lot about working hard.
As Wyomingites, we have a deep connection to place,
and I feel that, myself, as a Wyomingite.
And the Japanese-American community
also has a deep connection to this place.
- Well I would certainly encourage everyone to visit.
It's open year-round.
It's a wonderful, maybe too well-kept secret
that's available here for those of us in Wyoming.
Aura Newlin, thank you so much.
- Thank you so much for helping share this story.
- For joining us here on Wyoming Chronicle.
- Thank you.

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wyomingite::noun | Spocien Dictionary

wyomingite

noun

/waɪ'oʊmɪŋ,aɪt/

a native or resident of Wyoming

Type	Words
Type of	american

How to pronounce wyomingite in English?

wyomingite::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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