Exile from Paradise, Internment in New Mexico: My Grandfather’s Journey The Telling New Mexico Inaugural Lecture Series

Gail Y. Okawa, professor of English at Youngstown State University in Ohio, delivers the next talk in the Telling New Mexico Inaugural Lecture Series at 2 pm Sunday, March 28, in the History Museum Auditorium, 113 Lincoln Ave. “Exile from Paradise, Internment in New Mexico: My Grandfather’s Journey,” recounts Okawa’s search for a family story that had lived in silence – and that carries lessons for today.

The lecture costs $10. Tickets can be purchased at any of the Museum of New Mexico shops or online at http://www.museumfoundation.org/tellingnm. The lecture series supports the History Museum's core exhibition as well as the book Telling New Mexico: A New History (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009).

A granite boulder at Frank S. Ortiz Park looking down into Santa Fe’s Casa Solana neighborhood marks the World War II site of an internment camp that held 4,555 Japanese and Japanese-American internees from 1942-46. In all, the United States imprisoned 17,477 people of Japanese ancestry and relocated 120,000 American-born Japanese and their parents into wartime camps. The U.S. Department of Justice oversaw the camp in Santa Fe; the U.S. Army maintained others.

The History Museum’s core exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now includes illustrations of camp life done by one of the guards, Hal West.

Okawa’s maternal grandfather was moved from his home in Hawaii to Lordsburg, N.M., and then Santa Fe. The late Tamasaku Watanabe was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. Okawa’s chapter in Telling New Mexico includes portions of a letter she wrote to him after his death, when she had begun piecing together the scraps of his history:

The legacy of your experience and that of others like you who endured internment must be in what we who follow can learn from your political misfortune and your personal fortitude. We must be vigilant to the acts and words today echoing those that surrounded your unjust and unwarranted imprisonment. And we must understand that though you were silent, like so many others, about this difficult time in your life, you were no less affected by the degradation, no less courageous for bearing it.

In 1988, the United States officially apologized for the internments, saying the actions were the result of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

As a scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution in 2002, Okawa began a study of U.S. language history through ethnic language artifacts in the Smithsonian collections. Since 2003, she has been engaged in research on the politics of language/literacy, identity, and culture among Japanese immigrants, including her maternal grandfather. An advisory board member of the New Mexico Digital History Project, she has published numerous articles in national journals and anthologies and has presented papers and lectures locally in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, as well as nationally and internationally. She is working on a book-length study, More Than A Mugshot: Hawai`i Japanese Immigrants in World War II U.S. Department of Justice Internment.

Two other lectures remain in the Telling New Mexico Inaugural Lecture Series. Each will be held at 2 pm in the Museum Auditorium:

May 2: UNM Regents’ Professor of History Ferenc Szasz on “New Mexico in the Era of the Second World War.” Szasz has written several books on the early history of the Atomic Age; his latest is Larger Than Life: New Mexico in the Twentieth Century.

Aug. 22: Diné author and Northern Arizona University Associate Professor of History Jennifer Nez Denetdale on " Dine'/Navajo Women: At the Intersection of Nation, Gender, and Tradition," from her current book project. Denetdale has also written Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Chief Manuelito and Juanita and a book for young adults, The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile.