The Manzanar Experience: Coming to Terms with the Past & Deepening Our Understanding of the Present

PSR student Kathy Seibert writes:

The Manzanar Experience taught at San Leandro (CA) Community Church was the culmination of a class taken at Pacific School of Religion in affiliation with the Pacific and Asian North American (PANA) Institute. PANA offers a class entitled America's Internment: Theological Pilgrimage to Manzanar, in which students spend several weeks learning about the Japanese American internment before journeying to one of the actual sites of the incarceration of American citizens during WW II. For my final project, I chose to create a four-week long class to share what I had learned with my church family. We started by looking at the events that occurred immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, moved on to a look at the camps themselves, then studied the legal ramifications of imprisoning one's own innocent citizens, and concluded with the work done by the children and grandchildren of the original internees to achieve redress and reparations.

The participants were surprised at the information I shared with them. Even today, one of the men in my class tells me that when he went to work and shared what he was learning, those people had no idea that the US government went down to places like Peru and kidnapped men, women, and children there to use in prisoner exchanges. I met the descendants of some of those illegally imprisoned Japanese Peruvians during my PANA class, and they are working very hard to get this information out, especially after the World Trade Center tragedy. All in all, everyone walked away with a bit more knowledge about a painful experience in American history, and they recognized that the same thing has happened to Muslim Americans and Arab Americans in the years after 9/11.

For more information, contact Kathy Seibert at kathy@seibert.net.

Kathy Seibert, a student at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, taught a class on the Japanese American internment camps of WW II for San Leandro Community Church. The church experience was both a much clearer understanding of past atrocities as well as a deeper understanding of the present experiences of misunderstood and maligned groups. The article above was published in the January 2008 Model Ministries for Peace Rooted in Justice: a Newsletter for Partner Congregations of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.