The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) has received a $776,775 grant from the National Park Service for Exiled to the Rockies: Japanese American Incarceration During World War II, a program that will roll out nationwide educational programming in partnership with other Japanese American confinement site organizations in the Rocky Mountain region.
Heart Mountain was among the first recipients of grants from the Norman Y. Mineta Japanese American Confinement Education (JACE) program. HMWF will use the funds for the three-year program to conduct training workshops for K-12 teachers around the country, lead seminars on professional identity and ethics for graduate students in law, business, and journalism, and launch the Legacies of Incarcerated Nikkei Connect (LINC) online platform.
Four Rocky Mountain-area confinement sites – the Amache Alliance of Colorado, Friends of Minidoka in Idaho, Montana’s Historical Museum at Fort Missoula and Topaz Museum of Utah – will collaborate with Heart Mountain on all aspects of the program, which is named after former Heart Mountain incarceree, U.S. representative and Cabinet secretary Norman Mineta.
“We’re glad we can bring the stories of Heart Mountain and our Rocky Mountain partners to a wider audience,” said Shirley Ann Higuchi, chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. “We believe this is the kind of collaboration we need to highlight what happened at these sites during World War II.”
Douglas Nelson, HMWF’s vice chair, said the grant will “complement and strengthen the commitment of some of our core donors to help us advance education on this critical issue.”
Photo: Norman Mineta, for whom the JACE program is named, at the 2019 Heart Mountain Pilgrimage with Senator Alan Simpson and newscaster and author Tom Brokaw.