Several participants at the Manzanar Day of Action on Aug. 23 brought strings of folded paper cranes – a symbol of peace – to the monument.
Protest against administration’s policies held at WWII camp site.
Bruce Embrey, co-chair of the Manzanar Committee, gave the following speech at the Manzanar National Historic Site on Aug. 23 as part of the Day of Action protests.
In response to a recent ICE raid in Little Tokyo and the Trump Administration’s efforts to reshape the way American history is presented by the Smithsonian and the National Park Service, rallies were held at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, Minidoka in Idaho, Amache in Colorado, Honouliuli in Hawaii, and other historic sites.
We have returned to Manzanar for more than 50 years to honor our families, to heal and to remind America of the dangers of tossing aside our Constitution. We have demanded that the injustices our families endured never happen again to anyone.
But, today, we return to the ancestral land of the Paiute Shoshone people, to Manzanar to protest the attacks on our parks, to denounce the censorship and budget cuts to the NPS as well as to lift up the importance of this history to our communi-ties and our country.
But, most importantly, we come here today because we are outraged by the Trump regime’s attempt to erase our history, attack our democracy, and inflict the same horrific violence our families endured on other communities of color.
Innocent people are being detained, denied due process and locked away in inhumane prisons, all in the name of national security and public safety. ICE is terrorizing and brutalizing whole communities, disappearing people simply because of where their families come from. How is this different from what happened to our community when leaders disappeared into Fort Sill, Fort Bliss and other military sites and when whole communities were erased like Terminal Island, Calif.?
The white nationalists in power are flexing their political muscle to rewrite American history, regulate what gets taught in classrooms, and are trying to control what our museums and national parks tell us about the evolution of our country, to erase stories that undermine their ideology.
These attacks, on Manzanar, on the Smithsonian and other prestigious institutions, along with the baseless lawsuits against the media and universities, are all part of the authoritarian, white nationalist agenda, and are a cornerstone of their assault on our democratic rights.
Today, we are especially concerned that the historic sites that tell crucial stories of our country’s history — like Stonewall, Harriet Tubman, Emmet Till or the Sand Creek Massacre historic sites — will be censored and shuttered. These sites took decades to be established, largely because communities of color and impacted communities struggled to make their voices heard.
Manzanar is an important ex-ample. The MNHS only came into being after more than three decades of community-led pilgrimages and lobbying by those who had lived behind barbed wire.
However, the effort to whitewash the history of our country and of Manzanar and the forced removal is more than insulting. It is dangerous. We know our government developed a false narrative about how our community was a threat to national security. It was a lie. That lie, that false narrative led to the unjust incarceration of my mother and of more than 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry.
Today, we hear a new false narrative about other communities being a threat to our national security. And, today, the same law that was used to create American concentration camps, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, is being used again to unlawfully detain and deport people from our country. Thousands of people are being grabbed off our streets, denied due process, and forced to live in inhumane private for-profit prisons all over our country and the world.
Once again, we see the military being used … Our families were forcibly removed at the point of a bayonet to live in hastily constructed concentration camps. Once again our Constitution is being violated. Clearly, our country has not learned the lessons from Executive Order 9066.
This is why it is so important to preserve sites like Manzanar and speak out against history repeating itself.
Resisting these attacks and stop-ping this attempt to censor the truth about America’s history will take all of us. We are the agents of change that can turn the tide of authoritarianism.
This struggle is a struggle over who gets to shape the collective memory of our country
How things turn out will depend, in large part, on our work to shape the hearts and minds of our friends and neighbors. Those of us who value our Constitution, who value our democracy, need to be as vocal and as bold as they are. This is exactly why we are fighting so hard to make sure our parks are not censored or shut down.
We will not, we cannot stand idly by while the Trump regime and its white nationalist allies break the law, disappear our neighbors from their homes, schools and workplaces. We must speak out.
We will not allow our history to be erased, we will not allow communities to be erased and we will continue to speak out against the lawlessness of the Trump regime.
No more Manzanars! Never again is now!
Other speakers included:
Jeremiah Joseph, Paiute Shoshone cultural protector
Pat Sakamoto of the Manzanar Committee, who was born in Man-zanar
Bernadette Johnson, former superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site and member of National Parks Conservation Association
Fran Hunt and Virginia Figueroa of Inyo 350 (Eastern Sierra action network)
Noah Williams of the Bishop Paiute Tribe
Wendy Schneider, Friends of the Inyo
Jeff Griffiths, Inyo County supervisor