In one sense, a story in High Country News by Kori Suzuki is about the memory of James Wakasa, a Japanese immigrant who was fatally shot by an American soldier while in a federal prison camp in Utah during World War II. But things get a lot more complicated than that. The story recounts how researcher Nancy Ukai wrote a 2020 paper about the 63-year-old Wakasa's killing at the Topaz Relocation Center in 1943. (A teenage soldier thought he was trying to escape, though it appears he was merely walking his dog.) She wrote that fellow prisoners erected a concrete and stone monument where Wakasa died, noting that the government had it quickly removed. Two archaeologists saw her paper, investigated on land now owned by the Topaz Museum, and discovered that part of the monument was still there—buried beneath the earth.
The discovery led to debate among the archaeologists, descendants of those incarcerated there, and the museum over issues of consent, archaeological standards, and the right way to handle the monument's recovery. As the debate unfolded, the museum excavated the monument without broad community consensus or professional archaeological methods. Museum director Jane Beckwith has since apologized over how things were handled, particularly to relatives who wished they could have been present at its recovery. Meanwhile, the "monument is once again shrouded in darkness," writes Suzuki. "It still sits on a wooden pallet in the back corner of the courtyard behind the museum in Delta, sealed away inside a locked enclosure designed to protect it from any further damage." (Read the full story.)
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