POWELL, Wyo. — The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is now accepting applications from educators from around the country to participate in workshops to learn about the Japanese American incarceration during World War II and share that history with their students.
Applications for the workshops — “Echoes of History: Mistreatment and Incarceration in the American West” — will be accepted through March 3, 2023. The workshops, which will be conducted at the site of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center and various locations in Cody and Powell, will be offered during the weeks of June 18-23 and July 23-28, 2023.
This will be the third consecutive year in which Heart Mountain will lead the workshops as part of the Landmarks of American History and Culture program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Thirty-six educators will travel to Heart Mountain for each week of the program for a total of 72 educators overall. They will receive a $1,300 stipend to help pay for their travel and lodging while in the Cody-Powell area.
Heart Mountain has assembled a faculty that includes leading scholars of the Japanese American incarceration and members of the foundation staff, including Interim Executive Director Aura Sunada Newlin, who is a descendant of Heart Mountain incarcerees.
The program places the incarceration that forced 14,000 people of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wire at Heart Mountain into the larger context of mistreatment of ethnic and ideological minorities in the American West, starting with the area’s Native American nations, Chinese immigrants in southern Wyoming, and German immigrants in Montana.
Interested educators can learn more about and find applications on the Heart Mountain website at https://sites.google.com/heartmountain.org/hmwf-workshops/home and the NEH website at https://www.neh.gov/programinstitutefellowship/echoes-history-mistreatment-and-incarceration-american-west.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell. For more information, call the center at (307) 754-8000 or email info@heartmountain.org.