In northwest Wyoming, Heart Mountain silently overlooks the towns Cody and Powell. Between Aug. 1942 and Nov. 1945, the town’s people witnessed the incarceration of over 14,000 Japanese Americans. Now, according to The Billings Gazette, Montana State University-Billings (MSUB) is “offering a course dedicated to the Heart Mountain site” to educate students about a portion of history that is often overlooked.
MSUB geography professor Susan Gilbertz hopes that the university’s newly offered course will emphasize “questions about how place and time interact with cultural identity,” and questions like “where are [the] geographies of war that are not in the news or not visible to us?”
“Maybe it wasn’t a battle, but it was certainly something that happened because of war,” she said.
In light of the current political climate, Gilbertz also stated”This is a really good thing to do right now — to talk about immigrants to the American society…It’s right here in our backyard,” she said.
This holiday season, more than 14,000 migrant toddlers, children and teens, according to Time , spent Christmas in “U.S. government detention and processing centers across the country.”
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Gilbertz states that she hopes to “use this real place to really force us to think about immigration, not in the abstract.”
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RE: University to Offer Course on Japanese Incarcerstion Site in Wyoming: Is this an entire class (quarter or semester) or just a portion of the course? Many colleges/universities incorporate aspects of the incarceration within a course. Thanks forincarceration the clarification.