Look Toward the Mountain: Stories from Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp Heart Mountain
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- History
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This podcast tells the stories of Japanese Americans who were mass incarcerated at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming during WWII. Told through a combination of archival recordings, written accounts, and contemporary interviews - each episode delves into specific topics demonstrating the innovation, creativity, and resilience that enabled the Japanese American community to endure this unjust ordeal.
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Who We Are Today
Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. The third episode explores how Japanese American identity has been shaped by our connections to, and relationship with Japan and Japanese culture.
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Something Lost and Something Found
Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This second episode explores the postwar resettlement of Japanese Americans. Some kept their heads down and tried to assimilate into the broader society while others turned to activism that would birth the pilgrimage movement, that would ultimately help fuel a national reckoning with the injustice of wartime incarceration.
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Issei Pioneers of the Old West
Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This first episode tells the stories of Japanese immigrants who achieved great success in the California agriculture industry, others who settled rural parts of the West as railroad laborers or miners, and the undercurrent of racism and xenophobia that ultimately restricted further immigration after 1924.
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Sports and Leisure
The tenth episode titled “Sports and Leisure” looks at how the Heart Mountain incarcerees embraced both modern American and traditional Japanese types of entertainment and sports in camp. Although this helped Japanese Americans endure their time as prisoners and brought different people together inside the camp, it was also part of the government’s plan to assimilate them into the broader American society in the postwar era.
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The Artists
The ninth episode titled “The Artists” will examine the dozens of professional and amateur artists who emerged from Heart Mountain with compelling bodies of work that informed their later careers. And almost 75 years after the end of the incarceration, a fight over the future of art made in camp would help define a new wave of Japanese American activism.
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Crime and Punishment
The eighth episode titled “Crime and Punishment” will explore how Japanese Americans incarcerated at Heart Mountain established their own system of self-governance, complete with elected officials, a legal system, and police force to maintain the law and order within the prison camp. Content warning: sexual assault.
Customer Reviews
Informative
I love learning about this unacknowledged part of American history. I find the narrator’s voice easy to listen to, but the background music is often overdone and so overwhelming that I cannot finish the episode. I can barely hear the speaker’s voice over the loud and incessant background music. Otherwise, informative, interesting and important!