Monuments, Memorials, and Memory: Marking History and Claiming the Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The memorialization of sites of Japanese American Confinement is uneven at best, with some sites extensively marked while others remain anonymous. At the same time, practices and histories told about certain spaces create particular narratives about the ways in which places came to be, naturalizing certain histories and alienating others. This paper looks to the myriad of ways in which sites connected to the history of Japanese American incarceration are articulated, at times with physical monuments and memorials, and in other cases, more ephemerally. These practices of memory making are not only intimate to the communities connected to particular places, but consequential to how narratives of history form.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow