Heart Mountain Reveals a Darker Side of American History

Due to continuing structural instability, visitors can't go inside the four original buildings, but the foundation hopes to restore and open them someday.

"Even though most of the camp is gone, there's something visceral about being on the site and feeling the wind and, in winter, the cold,” says Aura Newlin, a member of the foundation board of directors and a descendant of Heart Mountain internees. “My hope is that visitors see how fragile democracy can be. Heart Mountain is a sobering reminder that, even when things get scary, we need to make sure we're not reacting in ways that harm people on the basis of their status, race or ethnicity."

A different point of view

Courtesy of Kevin J. Miyazaki

The exhibits and artifacts at Heart Mountain are presented and described in the first person. “Instead of a detached author voice, this is narrated from the perspective of ‘we,'” says Russell. Newlin adds, “It's subtle but really shapes the visitor experience. Instead of saying, ‘This happened to them,’ displays are written, ‘This happened to us. We were living here.’ It makes for a more powerful and empathetic visitor experience."

The first-person perspective starts as soon as you enter the center. In All We Could Carry — a 15-minute documentary by the son of a former Heart Mountain internee — 12 former residents share stories from their lives at the camp. Other exhibits tell how the camp's high school football team (1,500 teens graduated from Heart Mountain High School) lost only one game to nearby high schools over three years. Mothers tell stories of giving birth at the camp's hospital (550 babies were born at Heart Mountain). Individual items on display include ice skates belonging to Newlin's great-aunt and her grandfather's military uniform, dog tags, mess kit and military ribbons. (About 33,000 Japanese Americans were drafted into or volunteered to serve in the U.S. military in World War II, including about 900 from Heart Mountain. Look for an Honor Roll bearing the names of those Heart Mountain internees up the hill from the center, near a quarter-mile paved interpretive walking trail.)

"The skates get you into the mind of the youth here,” Newlin says. “They were in prison with barbed wire surrounding them and found ways to be teenagers.”

Throughout the center, life-size cutouts of prisoners from archival black-and-white photos put you next to them — on a train platform waiting to be taken from California to Wyoming, in a pottery class at camp, and doing projects alongside fellow Boy Scouts from Cody and Powell. “We try and display the collection in a way that shows the prisoners were all individuals, not a monolith,” Russell says. “Because we only have space to display a small portion of our collection, we keep it in rotation. People who come back see something different than they saw before. We have so many stories we can tell."

Coming next

There will be more to see soon. The government sold all 457 barracks when the camp closed, but the foundation bought back one of them in 2015 and shipped it back to Heart Mountain. With a recent grant from the National Park Service, the foundation has been restoring it and hopes to open it to visitors in September. “In the museum, we already have recreated rooms made to look like barracks, but they're generic,” Russell says. “We wanted to make the real barrack more personal, so we picked three former incarcerees and are recreating their actual childhood rooms. These spaces will be narrated by them."

"The barrack is very important,” says Sam Mihara, a member of the foundaton board of directors who was brought to the camp as a 9-year-old with his family. (He's not one of the three former residents whose narrations will become part of the center.) “When they brought that back, it made a huge difference in my remembering what life there was like. When I set foot in it, I was immediately back 80 years to when I lived in a single small room for three years. Visitors will feel that.”