This month is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. I am certain that this is flying under many people’s radars. It shouldn’t. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I am familiarizing myself a lot more this year with the history of Japanese Internment. The entire country should be well-versed about this unjust and immoral travesty.

Today, I have decided to highlight a copy of Executive Order 9066 from the National Archives:

Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland. In the next 6 months, over 100,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were moved to assembly centers. They were then evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers, known as internment camps.

Read more here

You can also find more photographs and documents about Japanese Internment on the National Archives’ terrific “Our Documents Tumblr.”

I also wanted to share this wonderful illustration by Estelle Ishigo from her poignant account of her internment at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming titled “Lone Heart Mountain.” Ishigo was a white woman who was married to a Japanese American man. When he was evacuated from his home in California, she followed him to the Relocation Center. I really appreciated her book. If you can find a copy of it at your local library, I recommend it (it’s currently out of print).

by Estelle Ishigo in Lone Heart Mountain