Who Owns the Past? The Murder of James Wakasa and His Memorial Stone

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Eighty years ago, James Wakasa was shot and killed while walking his dog in the Utah desert. Wakasa was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II because of their ethnicity; he had been imprisoned at the Topaz Relocation Center and his killer was a Military Police guard. In a finding that would sound all too familiar even today, an official inquiry determined that the killing was a “justifiable military action.” Mr. Wakasa’s fellow incarcerees did not agree: they erected a stone memorial at the spot where he was killed. The military and the camp administration quickly ordered the monument removed. The Japanese American community’s reaction to the recent archaeological discovery that the memorial was still present, although largely buried, exemplifies the power of place and artifacts to express, and ideally to help heal, intergenerational trauma. However, the abrupt removal of the stone by a local museum triggered a new debate: what role should the descendant community play in preserving and interpreting their own history?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35846.0