Friends of Minidoka pushes for education

EDEN, Idaho – The farmland faces a skinny stretch of Hunt Road, rural fields that barely resemble the sagebrush-ridden piece of desert where Charles Coiner learned to drive as a teenager in Southern Idaho.

The state senator, a Republican from Twin Falls, grew up about 15 miles away from the site where Japanese-Americans were detained behind five miles of barbed wire during World War II, living in tarpaper-covered barracks at the Minidoka Relocation Center compound.

“Even driving by here as a kid,” he said, “nobody talked about it.”

Coiner revisited the site last month with a group of Centennial High School students on a field trip, the culmination of several weeks the students spent studying World War II internment camps such as Minidoka.

They found a broken-down root cellar and a few barracks, remnants of one of the darker chapters in Idaho history when the state hosted one of the largest of the 10 wartime camps the U.S. government built to detain Japanese-Americans.

Coiner is among those supporting early efforts by the Friends of Minidoka nonprofit group to bring a comprehensive history of the World War II internment camp into Idaho public schools.

Students are being taught little, if anything, about the history of the site and what took place there, said Friends of Minidoka board member Steve Thorson. “There isn’t a broad understanding of what happened,” he said.

The camps were created after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which led to the declaration of the West Coast as a forbidden zone to those with at least one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry.

The organization was founded six years ago to preserve the history and advance education about the Minidoka site, which held an estimated 10,000 Japanese-Americans at one point and designated a national monument in 2001.

But the initiative to build a statewide curriculum based on the internment camp, a proposal the Idaho Department of Education has agreed to consider and former detainees support, could be complicated because the development of the monument is still in early stages.

Plans for a visitor center at Minidoka are targeted for 2010, said National Park Service education specialist Annette Rousseau. “That’s one of the difficulties of going out there,” she said. “There’s not a lot to see.”

The agency also works with various historical societies to preserve the stories of surviving Minidoka detainees, also a difficult task.

In the decades since their release, many Japanese-Americans remained largely silent about their experience in the camps, which operated in the western United States and Arkansas between 1942 and 1946.

“There was almost nothing about this in the history books,” said Robert Sims, a Boise State University emeritus professor who researched the camps extensively.

A program designed by Centennial High School teacher Gena Marker prompted the Friends of Minidoka to pitch a statewide version. Thorson said his proposal could be modeled after a similar curriculum adopted in Washington state.

Densho, a Seattle-based nonprofit founded to preserve the history of the camps, was awarded a state grant last year to build the Washington curriculum.

Thorson plans to hammer out the details of an Idaho curriculum with the state Department of Education, such as how much implementation would cost and how it would fit with statewide standards for history education.

“We’re willing to talk about it,” said department spokeswoman Melissa McGrath.

While the initiative is taking shape, initial steps to ensure students know what happened to Japanese-Americans during the war are necessary, said Oregon resident Joe Saito, 90, who fought in the mostly Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team during the war.

Saito came to Boise last month to meet the Centennial High School students. Because he was in the military, he was never detained like his family and the woman he would marry.

Teaching younger generations about what happened is the only way to ensure it never happens again, Saito said.

“It’s part of our history,” said Saito, “what one group of people in our country had to go through.”