LibGuides: Heart Mountain Incarceration Center Research Guide: UW Libraries Resources

Secondary Source Databases

Primary Sources

WWII Japanese American Internment and Relocation Records in the National Archives
The US National Archives provides access to Japanese internment and relocation records. These can provide a wealth of information for researchers and family historians.
Executive Order 9066
You can access the executive order which resulted in the incarnation of Japanese Americans.
Japanese American National Museum
The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles provides digital access to their collections.
Online Archive of the Japanese American Relocation during World War II
Occidental College hosts this collections of resources related to the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans.
Gonzaga Libraries Heart Mountain Resources
Gonzaga's Foley Library has resources related to Heart Mountain within their collections.

Heart Mountain Books

Barbed Voices by Arthur A. Hansen; Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (Foreword by) Barbed Voices is an engaging anthology of the most significant published articles written by the well-known and highly respected historian of Japanese American history Arthur Hansen, updated and annotated for contemporary context. Featuring selected inmates and camp groups who spearheaded resistance movements in the ten War Relocation Authority-administered compounds in the United States during World War II, Hansen's writing provides a basis for understanding why, when, where, and how some of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans opposed the threats to themselves, their families, their reference groups, and their racial-ethnic community.   What historically was benignly termed the "Japanese American Evacuation" was in fact a social disaster, which, unlike a natural disaster, is man-made. Examining the emotional implications of targeted systemic incarceration, Hansen highlights the psychological traumas that transformed Japanese American identity and culture for generations after the war. While many accounts of Japanese American incarceration rely heavily on government documents and analytic texts, Hansen's focus on first-person Nikkei testimonies gathered through powerful oral history interviews gives expression to the resistance to this social disaster.   Analyzing the evolving historical memory of the effects of wartime incarceration, Barbed Voices presents a new scholarly framework of enduring value. It will be of interest to students and scholars of oral history, US history, public history, and ethnic studies as well as the general public interested in the WWII experience and civil rights.
ISBN: 9781607328117
Publication Date: 2018-11-05
Beyond Heart Mountain by Lee Ann Roripaugh Lee Ann Roripaugh has been hailed by Ishmael Reed as "one of the brightest talents" writing poetry today. In this collection, she gives voice to the Japanese immigrants of the American West. In an unforgiving land of dirt and sagebrush, mothers labor to teach their children of the ocean, old men are displaced by geography and language, and the ghosts of Hiroshima clamor for peace. Lee Ann Roripaugh's exquisitely crafted poems rise from the pages of Beyond Heart Mountain burdened with memory and pain, yet converting these to powerful art--art that is like "the pattern of kimono found burned into a woman after Hiroshima . . . almost too beautiful, too horrible . . . to bear." Remember to raise bright orbs of rice-paper lanterns by the goldfish pond, so they can watch for me with the yellow, unblinking gaze of nocturnal things . . . --from "Peony Lantern"
ISBN: 0140589201
Publication Date: 1999-06-01
Colors of Confinement by Eric L. Muller (Editor) In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee. The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps. Also contributing to the book are: Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press). She has also published articles and essays on photography and incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2009). She is currently working on a book on photography and the law. Lon Kurashige is associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies, politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography, cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), won the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American History (Cengage, 2003). Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
ISBN: 9780807835739
Publication Date: 2012-08-13
The Courage Our Stories Tell by Susan McKay This book looks at the lives of young women and young mothers interned at heart mountain relocation center.
ISBN: 0966155653
Publication Date: 2002-03-01
The Fabric of Memory by Heart This book represents an exhibit of 22 fabric artworks that were displayed at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in 2016 and made by 17 women of the Textile Artists of the Greater Yellowstone (TAGY), who hail from the Wyoming towns of Cody, Powell, Meeteetse, Lovell, Sheridan and Thermopolis--localities near the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. Also included is the depiction of a quilt by Naoko Yoshimura Ito, a Japanese American who, as a child, was forcibly removed from her home in 1942, and incarcerated at the "Heart Mountain Relocation Center" with her family.The Interpretive Center is located on the site of the former "Heart Mountain Relocation Center," which unjustly incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. Today, it is a National Historic Landmark site that includes the museum, memorial, walking trail and original camp structures.
ISBN: 9780997863208
Publication Date: 2016-07-25
Guilt by Association by Mike Mackey (Contribution by, Editor) Book contains essays which look at unknown or little known aspects of Japanese settlement, internment, and relocation in the Rocky Mountain West.
ISBN: 0966155645
Publication Date: 2001-04-01
Heart Mountain by Mike Mackey
ISBN: 0966155637
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
A Matter of Conscience by Mike Mackey (Editor) This book is a collection of essays that look at various aspects of the heart mountain draft resistance movement during world war II.
ISBN: 0966155661
Publication Date: 2002-09-01
Stanley Hayami by Joanne F. Oppenheim; Daniel Inouye (Foreword by) The "whole mess" as Stan put it, began on 7 December 1941, when the Japanese government attacked the United States Pacific fleet in Hawaii. On the following day the United States declared war on Japan and for those of Japanese decent, most of whom were American Citizens, life would never be the same. Stan's diary serves as witness to a dark time in our history and is told through the eyes of a teenager who will soon be expected to take up the responsibility of a man. As you read his diary, you will discover Stan's creative talents, as well as his idealism, his optimism, and his aspirations. He has a quirky sense of humour, along with a more serious side, and dreams of a "United Nations of Earth". He talks to his diary as a confidant, a safe place to express his opinions and record the everyday events of his life. No one told him he had to keep a journal. He wrote because he needed a private place to keep his ideas and think through the contradictions of his life. Stan and his family were swept up in the largest mass roundup in our country's history. On 14 May 1942 the Hayamis, along with thousands of others, were taken to the Pomona Fairgrounds, one of 16 Assembly Centres where the Nikkei (people of Japanese ancestry) were temporarily imprisoned until more permanent Relocation Centres were built. The Hayamis were moved from Pomona to Heart Mountain in Wyoming. In November 1942, Stan Hayami began keeping a diary that captures the harsh reality of Wyoming and his personal struggles as a student, son, brother, friend, and citizen of the world, who despite all obstacles, holds onto his dreams of the future. It is his optimism that continues to shine through his diary, and his determination to improve himself as well as the world. His dreams will continue to inspire those who work to build a world where differences are not met with racism and war, but with respect for others and kindness that allows all people to live in harmony and with dignity.
ISBN: 1883283671
Publication Date: 2008-09-10
Heart Mountain by Gretel Ehrlich
Call Number: PS3555.H72 H4 1989
ISBN: 0140109064
Publication Date: 1989-12-01

Moving Walls Book

Sharon Yamato wrote the book Moving Walls: The Barracks of America’s Concentration Camps which includes photographs by Stan Honda about their project to dismantle two barracks at Heart Mountain and reassembled a barrack in Los Angeles as part of an exhibit of the Japanese American National Museum. You can view the book in our regular collection and within special collections. For more information about the book you can access the information here.

Denshō Online Repository

Denshō is a non-profit organization that was founded in order to preserve the history of Japanese Internment during World War II. They developed the Denshō Digital Repository of house the different materials they collected and digitized about Japanese Internment. There are numerous resources related to Heart Mountain in this repository including the Heart Mountain Sentinel. You can access the Digital Repository at https://densho.org/archives/

Special Collections

The Emmett D. Chisum Special Collections houses published materials related to the University of Wyoming and Wyoming history. They house numerous materials related to Heart Mountain including videos, books, government reports, and charters. You can browse the Special Collections via the search box and check out some selected materials below. Chisum Special Collections also houses physical copies of the Heart Mountain Sentinel a newspaper published within Heart Mountain.

Special Collections Selected Materials

A Boy of Heart Mountain by Barbara Bazaldua; Willie Ito (Illustrator) Experiences of Shigeru Yabu as a boy and being interned at a relocation camp for Japanese during World War 2 at Heart Mountain, CA.
ISBN: 9780578053424
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
The Charter of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming by Irving Block (Illustrator); David Perkins (Introduction by)
ISBN: 0937048321
Publication Date: 1983-01-01
Enemy Child by Andrea Warren It's 1941 and ten-year-old Norman Mineta is a carefree fourth grader in San Jose, California, who loves baseball, hot dogs, and Cub Scouts. But when Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor, Norm's world is turned upside down as, one by one, things that he and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months, they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind. Norm and his family are sent to Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, where they live in one room in a tar paper barracks with no running water. There are lines for the communal bathroom, lines for the mess hall, and they live behind barbed wire and under the scrutiny of armed guards in watchtowers. Interweaving meticulous historical research and extensive interviews with Norman Mineta, Andrea Warren takes readers from sunny California to an isolated wartime prison camp and finally to the halls of Congress to tell the true story of a boy who rose from "enemy child" to a distinguished American statesman.
ISBN: 9780823441518
Publication Date: 2019-04-30
Hello Maggie! by Shigeru Yabu; Willie Ito (Illustrator) The author tells about his and his family's experiences as Japanese American internees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming from 1942 to the end of World War II. During that time, he made friends with a magpie whom he named Maggie.
ISBN: 0978976703
Publication Date: 2007-01-01

Wyoming Newspapers

University of Wyoming Libraries and the State Library are working to digitize Wyoming Newspapers. You can access the Wyoming State Library online newspaper's at https://newspapers.wyo.gov. This database features numerous newspapers that published information about Heart Mountain.