Victimized Twice 4 of 4

Victimized Twice:

            

Part 4 of 4:  Healing and the Failure of the NPS at Sites of Consciousness

At the 2009 Tule Lake Pilgrimage, more than 60 years later, that conflict between Japanese American victims of the forced removal and illegal incarceration who developed Stockholm syndrome symptoms, and those of the Japanese American community who refused to buy into the government denigration and fought for their human and civil rights would flare up into heated arguments.  I was shocked when I realized the implications this argument.  This bias for the veterans and against the resisters and protestors was still alive and well in the JACL, in the Japanese American community, AND in the NPS interpretation of the Japanese American stories.  In all the NPS interpretation materials, the Japanese American World War II veterans and their exploits were always given much more standing, type, and dialogue than the resisters and protestors.  Even here at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, being a protestor or a resister was still (in 2009) looked at as an embarrassment rather than as a courageous person risking persecution to exercise the highest American ideal:  the right to oppose unjust and unconstitutional laws, policies, and policy makers.   Instead of being recognized as heroes of the story of the illegal imprisonment in their own right, the resisters and protestors still carry the 60+ year stigma of being “disloyal” and “trouble makers.”  It is not a coincidence that this is the very same rhetoric that the American government and the WRA branded this segment of the Japanese American population with back in the 1940s.  The majority of the Japanese Americans who were victimized by the injustices and illegalities of the forced removal and false incarceration were also victimized by the Stockholm syndrome.  These Stockholm syndrome victims identified and sympathized with the racist rhetoric of their captors (the American Government) and the cost of this capitulation was the “irrational” judgment against themselves and their own best interests as outlined above. 

The first step in the path to healing and recovering from trauma and victimization is to recognize the source of the trauma and victimization.  Those members of the Japanese American community, who were victimized by the Stockholm syndrome while the American Government held them hostage in concentration camps, were literally twice-victimized.  The denial of the human and citizen rights for the Japanese Americans held hostage in the concentration camps during World War II created a situation where these Stockholm syndrome victims accepted the “lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.”  By “identifying” with the captors and abusers (the racist elements of the American Government) the victims (the Stockholm syndrome victims in the concentration camps) believed their captors would accept them.  To heal from this abuse and victimization, these Stockholm victims must first recognize that they were victims of this type of abuse.  Part of this recognition is to re-frame the Tule Lake, Kibei, and dissident stories into narratives that are as heroic as the stories of those who fought in the 442^nd and 100^th Battalion for the Americans in World War II.  This could go a long way to healing the long-standing schism within the Japanese American community. 

Do not look to the National Park Service (NPS) stewards of the America’s Concentration Camps for leadership in this matter.  The agency is to inflated with its own agenda for power to ever acknowledge that its sister organization, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) acted in the role of kidnappers and captors.   For the National Park Service and the American government the “model minority” paradigm perfectly suits the reasoning they need to justify the injustices and mistreatment of a segment of American citizens.  Go to Manzanar National Historic Site and you will see in the interpretive materials and hear from the brainwashed NPS interpreters a “balanced” story about internment.  The crux of this “balanced” story is that Ralph Merritt and the other WRA employees were well-intentioned heroes and kind overseers who made life in the camps pleasant.  You will neither find or hear anything about the intergenerational injury and damaged caused by an entire segment of American citizens being kidnapped and held hostage by the American government and the WRA overseers.  To apply the model of kidnappers and captors to the American Government and the WRA in the 1940’s would require the NPS to examine its own dignity, honor, and motivations and require this agency to reframe its mission for sites of conscience.  This is something the good-ole-boy, authoritarian NPS is incapable of doing. 

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA

Informal Interpretation Sites of Conscience 1

Informal Interpretation at Sites of Conscience 

            Part 1 of 4:  The National Park Service Mandate 

National Park Service Director’s Orders

6.  Personal and Non-Personal Services

             6.1 Personal Services

Personal services are those in which staffs... facilitate opportunities for emotional and intellectual connections between the resources and the visitors.

By their nature, Sites of Conscience are rife with emotion and create emotional dichotomies.   The National Park Service (NPS) mandate (see above) for these sites is to provide a venue where visitors can experience and confront these potentially volatile emotions.   Sites of Conscience exist as recognition of a historical event wherein one group of people inflicted an injustice on another group of people. Historically, the perpetrators of the injustice created an institutionalized system of rationalizations and intellectual exemptions to justify their actions and defend their belief systems.  The victims of the injustice received and often continue to carry the emotional injury and trauma as a result of that injustice.  The designation of a Site of Conscience carries an implicit recognition that: 1) an injury and trauma was created from the perpetrated act; and 2) the perpetrated act was an injustice.  This dual recognition usually represents a de facto judgment against, and reversal of, the institutionalized belief system that created the injustice.  Too many visitors, this reversal of institutional beliefs is a greater affront than the initial injustice.  Sites of Conscience are sites of contention.  The diametrically opposed perspectives implicit in Sites of Conscience create unique challenges for evaluating visitor’s needs and facilitating opportunities to create NPS mandated emotional and intellectual connections to the site. 

All visitors to Sites of Conscience experience a degree of injury, whether that injury results from the trauma of the injustice, empathy for the victims of the injustice, guilt over perceived culpability in perpetrating the injustice, or the emotional injury and trauma that results from questioning and accusing the motivations and actions of an institutionalized belief system that the visitor may still be part of.  With a mandate to facilitate an emotional connection with the site, it is critical for the staff at Sites of Conscience to realize that the nature of this connection will most likely be an injury. Director’s Order  #6  Section 6.1.2 further clarifies the role of informal interpretation:

“[a]n informal visitor contact is an encounter between a visitor and an interpreter in which the objectives are defined by the visitor’s needs.”  

If the commonality of the visitors to a Site of Conscience is an emotional injury, then the common “need” of the visitor is for healing.  

Healing emotional injury and trauma requires a complex, cyclical process involving:  1) recognizing the emotional response; 2) acknowledging that the response is rooted in emotional injury and trauma; 3) understanding the origins of that injury.  Sites of Conscience provide the venue and informal interpretation can provide the facilitation for healing.  Most visitors to Sites of Conscience have already acknowledged that they have an emotional response to the event.  It is, in fact, this emotional response that draws these visitors to the site in the first place. The physical visit to the site establishes the connection between emotional injury and cause.  The interpretive materials and interactions at the site provide the intellectual understanding of how and why the injury happened.  The role of informal interpretation at Sites of Conscience is to facilitate this process.  A first visit a Site of Conscience may be emotionally overwhelming for a visitor attempting to understand the source of their injury.  Subsequent visits continue to provide an emotional response, each one slightly different and with new understanding and awareness.  Each subsequent visit provides the visitor with the opportunity to touch and verify that the injury was and continues to be real and to bring new awareness into the source of the injury.  This is the cyclical nature of healing.

There are several pitfalls for the interpreter at a Site of Conscience that may interfere with visitors’ making the emotional and intellectual connections with the site that they need to work through their individual processes of healing.  These pitfalls include: empathy, level of emotional comfort, personal belief systems, and forgiveness. 

Chad Montreaux

Newell, CA