TEDxMileHigh 2022

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I want you to imagine an incarceration camp like those where Americans of Japanese ancestry were held during WWII. Do you see barbed wire, guard towers, barracks? You should, because those were key features of these landscapes where whole families were confined between 1942 and 1945. 

When I picture one of those locations—Amache–I see all those things, but I also see trees, flowers, vegetables. I see gardens everywhere. That’s because of what I’ve learned from 7 summers of archaeological research, alongside crews of students and community members. Archaeology isn’t just about studying the distant past—it’s also a great way to learn about more recent human history, especially what gets left out of textbooks.

There’s a good chance, even if you grew up in the U.S., you know next to nothing about Japanese American Internment – but it’s one of America’s clearest acts of systemic racism, and it happened just 80 years ago. Almost immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the federal government released a series of presidential and military orders to forcibly remove Japanese Americans from the west coast.  Of the 120,000 people who were displaced, two-thirds were US citizens – born and raised. Most were given only one week’s notice before they had to report to nearby detainment centers. 

Just a few months later, they’d be sent to one of 10 confinement camps in remote areas of the country’s interior. The one where I work was officially called the Granada Relocation Center but is better known by its postal designation, Amache. It was the smallest of the camps, but it was still huge, holding nearly 8,000 people at its peak.  

Photos taken early on show just how barren it was when Amacheans arrived. The site’s in the High Plains, a dry and windy region that was just coming out of the dust bowl. The sandy soil is really only good for growing hardy wild plants—but few were to be found because the central camp area had been bulldozed for construction. As one incarceree recalled: “Everybody was shocked because there was nothing but sand and sandstorms and tumbleweeds. Not a thing to see.” And inside wasn’t much better: Barrack rooms were terrible & tiny spaces: most just 20 by 20 feet and covered in tarpaper.

Unlike most archaeologists, I actually get to talk to people who lived at my site. My work at Amache started with those conversations—since they help me know what to look for and why it is important. George Hirano, like almost all Amacheans, was removed from California. He generously shared and stories of his family and the vegetable garden in front of their barrack. And he told us that the Japanese-style pickles his Mom made with its produce were a welcome break from the institutional foods served in the mess hall. 

We knew that the Hiranos weren’t the only ones who worked to transform the bleak camp landscape. So my crews and I expected to encounter some garden remains during the first step of archaeological survey, where we systematically walk over the site. But what we found just blew us away. In every barracks block, we found evidence of an amazing number and variety of gardens.

But survey isn’t enough to truly understand these complex spaces, so we also explore some through excavation. The first garden we ever dug at Amache was pretty obvious—it featured two large oval beds. As we carefully removed the sand blown in since the camp closed, we found that the walls of these garden beds were intact and made of cinderblocks carefully split into four pieces. It was so clever – as used they look like basalt – a stone you might expect in a Japanese garden. 

We also uncovered the decaying bits of a tree planted in this garden and an abundance of native plant seeds. Transplanting wild plants into your garden is a very old Japanese gardening technique, and yet these are very symmetrical garden beds, a design more common in European gardens. And that’s so poignant, isn’t it? This garden isn’t Japanese, and it isn’t American either – it’s a Japanese American garden and a reminder that the majority of people imprisoned here called both cultures their own. 

When excavations were nearly complete, I met Amache survivor Ben Tani who not only recalled this garden, he sent me beautiful, joyful photos of his family in it. They remind me of what Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote about being in the Manzanar Gardens where you could “for a while not be a prisoner at all.” But they were prisoners – and the story behind this photo is hard to wrap your head around. Two of these young men were headed off to the European Front. They were Americans going to war to defend the freedoms denied their family and friends who remained behind barbed wire.

Our second summer, crews excavated a portion of this garden in front of Saiichiro and Bun Hirota’s barrack. They were an older couple who had managed a furniture store in Los Angeles before the war. I was delighted when crews found that they had improved the nutrient-poor soil by adding carefully crumbled eggshell, something I do in my own garden at home.  

We also discovered the Hirotas had turned broken water pipes on end to use as garden planters. And what’s particularly interesting about these discoveries is that eggshells & broken pipe wouldn’t have been easy to come by, something we learned from an Amache survivor who visited us that summer. She told us that to get eggshells you would’ve needed to know someone who worked in the kitchens. Likewise, only those who picked up the trash would have had easy access to broken construction materials. The Hirotas weren’t professional landscapers or farmers, but they were creative & connected. They used their social ties to personalize a place they didn’t choose to live. 

In 2012 we excavated what turned out to be a stunning Japanese-style entryway garden. One of the reasons I chose to further investigate this area is its primary feature – a wall that looks like stone but is, in fact, made of concrete slabs. We’ve been fortunate to work with Greg Kitajima, a garden professional, and Amache descendant, who said of the camp’s gardeners, “They were so limited in what they had…the use of concrete slabs is reflective of the Japanese American spirit.” 

When we removed the windblown soil between the doorway and this wall, we discovered they were connected by this beautiful cedar walkway. It led to stepping stones that went around the wall. Each time someone passed through this entryway garden, they would have had to slow down – to be aware and present for at least that moment. That kind of mindfulness is often one of the goals of traditional Japanese tea garden design but is elusive in a place like Amache. 

That summer, we took samples of this garden soil and sent them off to the lab for pollen analysis. I love it when the report on those microscopic remains arrives in my email inbox—it’s like Christmas morning; I never know what surprises it will hold. The pollen results suggest this garden was full of plants, including mint and canna, a tropical plant that is a relative of ginger and terribly difficult to grow on the high plains. These talented gardeners worked to make a garden that didn’t just look, but also smell beautiful. 

And while it’s true that these gardens transformed a hostile environment into one that was more productive and pleasant, I suspect there’s something deeper at play. Muso Soseki, who created one of the first Zen temple gardens, wrote, “He who distinguishes between the garden and practice cannot be said to have found the true Way.” And over 700 hundred years later, research in horticultural therapy is proving him right. Study after study shows that the physical effects of stress, anxiety, and even trauma are reduced when people spend time in a garden, but working in one is even more effective. It seems gardening was a practice uniquely suited to help these people of Japanese ancestry cope with the stresses of a nearly unlivable situation. In taking care of their gardens, they took care of themselves and each other.

One of the best parts of my work is spending so much time with Amache survivors. Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker was 3 when the train carrying her family pulled into Granada. She barely remembered her time at Amache, in part because her parents never spoke about it. For six seasons, Carlene’s been a stalwart member of our crew. She says that doing archaeology at Amache has helped her dig for her roots, and I have seen first-hand how being on site has helped her recover childhood memories. But the relationship is reciprocal because Carlene’s experiences enrich the archaeology. In 2018 we excavated near the recreation hall where she recalled taking naps with her little blankie as a preschooler. We found evidence that an alignment of trees would have shaded the poorly insulated building, and knowing that Carlene and other little ones would have been inside reveals this as a landscape of care.

The picture that comes from the archaeology of Amache’s gardens is that of resourceful, imaginative, and skilled people. When singled out because of their ancestry, they did not turn their back on their heritage but expressed it creatively and insistently. These gardens remain an amazing testament to the human spirit in a world where forces seemed bent on destroying it. And now, as of March 2022, Amache is set to become a National Park – meaning their legacy will remain for generations to come. 

Thank you.

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