“What’s Manzanar?”: Excavating Stories of Racism,of the Erased,and of Family

Abstract

Background/Research Design:

This ethnographic study explores how secondary students engaged with the history of Japanese American incarceration while participating in an archaeological dig at one of the prison camps used by the U.S. government during World War II, the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California.

Purpose/Research Question:

Using two tenets from Asian(Crit), (re)constructive history, and story, theory, and praxis as a theoretical frame, this study explores the question: How does participation in an archeological dig at Manzanar prison camp reveal and shape how students perceive the history of Japanese American incarceration?

Conclusions:

Four findings emerged from this study. First, students’ dominant understanding justified incarceration as a wartime necessity. Second, students were exposed to narratives at Manzanar that emphasized racism, countering classroom curriculum. The third finding explores how the family history of one Japanese American student informed her conceptualization of the U.S. history curriculum as purposefully whitewashed. Finally, once they had returned to school, students of color doubted whether their work at Manzanar or their sharing of counterstories would impact their white classmates.

Words Matter

. . .there has been a long history of using euphemistic language about the wartime atrocity that was wreaked upon the Japanese Americans of the West Coast during and after World War II. Begun with malice aforethought by government officials, politicians, and journalists, it has been continued, largely in thoughtless innocence, by scholars. As we are in the seventh decade after the promulgation of Executive Order 9066, it is high time that scholars begin to call things by their right names. Let us hear no more about the “internment of the Japanese Americans.” [emphasis added] (Daniels, 2005, pp. 205–206)

In 2005, historian Roger Daniels published a chapter titled “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans.” Using international law, he details how “internment” is a phrase used to describe the detention of “enemy aliens” during wartime. Yet, more than two-thirds of those incarcerated during World War II were U.S. citizens. Having been born in Asia, the remaining incarcerees were legally barred from citizenship due to the Nationality Act of 1790, which limited naturalization to “free white persons,” a civic exclusion continued by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 until it was fully repealed in 1952. As quoted above, Daniels urged scholars to stop using the word “internment” when referring to the incarceration of Japanese Americans. He attributed the continued use “largely in thoughtless innocence,” a claim that may have been true in 2005, but can no longer hold weight in 2024.

As early as 1943, the U.S. government was publicly censured not only for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, but also for hiding their actions behind euphemisms. When General John Dewitt, in carrying out the “evacuation” of Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast, declared “A Jap’s a Jap,” the Washington Post responded by calling out the U.S. government “sometimes referred to as the symbol of democracy,” for incarcerating U.S. citizens “in places euphemistically called ‘relocation centers’. . .because of their racial background” [emphasis added] (“Sound and Fury,” 1943, p. 10). In his testimony during the redress movement where the Japanese American community demanded an apology and reparations from the U.S. government for World War II incarceration, Raymond Okamura (1982) gave five reasons the government intentionally chose euphemistic language:

(1) it sidetracked legal and constitutional challenges; (2) it allowed the government to maintain a decent public image; (3) it helped lead the victims into willing cooperation; (4) it permitted the White civilian employees to work without self-reproach; and (5) it kept the historical record in the government’s favor. (p. 101)

The dominant use of “internment” may not have the exact historical narrative of “relocation centers,” but its misuse is only one of many euphemisms strategically enforced by government officials at the time of incarceration, which in its current continuance is at best a careless happenstance, and at worst, a deliberate cover. Daniels notes that the use of “internment” has allowed for a veneer of legality (however morally dubious) by focusing on the one-third who could not become U.S. citizens and erasing the two-thirds who were citizens.

In the field of Asian American studies, many scholars have long ago shifted to “incarceration.” Scholars of education have lagged behind, especially in the discipline of social studies, where current research and curriculum too often continue to use “internment.” In social studies education, where Japanese American incarceration is most relevant, it was not until 2017 when a social studies scholar called for those in our field to let go of a term that is simultaneously grounded in racism while obscuring its origin and intent (Rodríguez, 2017). Yet, there is still too often an unwillingness to shift to “incarceration” as educators and education scholars largely continue to use “internment.”

Words and stories, according to transdisciplinary scholar Sylvia Wynter (1995), determine what the world sees as possible. Therefore, they shape our ethics and our behaviors. What kinds of ethics and behaviors might we expect, then, if our narratives continue to include Asian Americans as “enemy aliens” (e.g., from incarceration to anti-Asian violence during COVID-19), or the United States as justified in implementing racist policies (e.g., Executive Order 9066, the Muslim ban)? As Daniels (2005) wrote, “words do matter” (p. 1), especially in a social and political context where many continue to reify dominant narratives that justify U.S. “wartime atrocit[ies]” (p. 11).

Scholars and teachers of education have a responsibility to make known and disrupt these narratives that have shaped our shared world into one that inflicts and justifies symbolic and physical violence on marginalized communities. As anti-Asian violence has become more visible in recent years, tracing its history and unraveling supporting ideologies is vital. This study explores how one such history is taught and taken up. I focus on the dominant and counter narratives surrounding Japanese American incarceration that emerged in two spaces: one within school walls, and the other outside the borders of school as students volunteered at an excavation of a World War II prison camp, Manzanar.

Review of Literature

Manzanar in Context: Narratives from Asian American Studies

Although Japanese American incarceration is presented as a simple historical narrative of national security, or perhaps as an aberrant, undemocratic policy of the U.S. government, historical research shows otherwise. Asian Americanists have long presented the complexity of Japanese American incarceration, including the lives of former incarcerees before, during, and after World War II.

Before World War II: Laws and Policies

The Nationality Act passed by the U.S. government in 1790 guaranteed that Asian immigrants would be ineligible for U.S. citizenship until this policy was changed in 1952 (Ngai, 2014). Yet, following the success of western imperialist efforts in the Asian continent, Asians continued to immigrate to the United States, whether as labor recruits, students, merchants, or individuals and communities seeking greater economic and political stability (Okihiro, 1994). West Coast states such as California had higher numbers of Asian immigrants, and in the early 20th century racist backlash turned into state policies with antimiscegenation laws and Alien Land laws that prohibited Asians from owning property (Baldoz, 2011; Tsu, 2013). This meant that first-generation (Issei) Japanese were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens, and many in California (who often worked in agriculture) could only rent land or own property through their children, who, through the 14th Amendment and the court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), were guaranteed birthright citizenship.

Before World War II: Communities and Belonging

Many families of Japanese descent in the United States kept close ties to Japan for many reasons, including the reality of the racism they faced in the states (Azuma, 2005). For the first generation, Japan was the only nation-state they could belong to, and some believed that their children would potentially need to know how to survive and succeed in Japan. Simultaneously, many within these same communities identified as “Americans.” Takao Ozawa, the Japanese-born plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Ozawa v. United States (1922), argued that he was essentially an American who deserved the right to naturalize. In her monograph, City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950, historian Valerie Matsumoto (2014) details the civic, religious, and social organizations, many of which were distinctly “American” (e.g., YWCA, Protestant churches), that facilitated a thriving community for Nisei (second-generation) women in Los Angeles.

Manzanar as a Historical Site

It was in this context that President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which sent over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into prison camps from 1942 to 1945. Manzanar was one of these camps, roughly constructed in the desert in central California at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Although far from urban centers, Manzanar was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers where soldiers with guns kept prisoners inside the camp. Currently, Manzanar as a historic site is considered one of the best preserved World War II prison camps (National Park Foundation, 2023).

The reconstruction of Manzanar was itself a political process and creation led by the National Parks Service (NPS). Originally, the site’s connection to World War II (one of the major categories determined by the NPS) was the catalyst for studying Manzanar for designation as a historical site. Some politicians looked to Manzanar as a physical reminder that the United States would not make the same mistake. Following the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the U.S. government apologized and gave reparations to the formerly incarcerated, some saw Manzanar as a symbol of U.S. progress. Others, however, remember Manzanar as a site of Asian American activism in the 1960s (Hayashi, 2003). The many contested memories and meanings of Manzanar came to light as it moved toward reconstruction, and they continue to do so as new visitors make their own meanings.

The contestation of meanings led Asian American scholar Robert Hayashi (2003) to raise a concern that became a reality as this study took place:

What is perhaps most troubling in light of the pedagogical role these sites are intended to play is the assumption that these sites alone can explain both the history of ethnic Japanese in America and their maltreatment during the war. (pp. 54–55)

Hayashi’s particular interest with the process and designation of Manzanar as a historical site was how long and complex histories became confined to one topic at one moment: incarceration between 1942 and 1945. This continues to be troubling, especially as the narratives around Japanese American histories, including incarceration, are limited and distorted in many other spaces.

Silenced and Distorted Curriculum

Education has often been used as a tool to uphold economic hierarchies (Alexander, 2010; Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Willis, 1978) and white supremacy (Vaught, 2011), and to discipline those with cultural differences (Yosso, 2005). Social studies, in particular, has been positioned similarly, with states, publishers, and standards writers conflating history and heritage (Lowenthal, 1998) to create dominant historical narratives that center whiteness while simultaneously obscuring that fact (Sleeter & Zavala, 2020). In doing so, too many social studies curricula (written and taught) deliberately silence or distort in schools the histories of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities (An, 2022; Díaz & Deroo, 2020; Heilig et al., 2012; King, 2020; Sabzalian et al., 2021; Sleeter & Carmona, 2017; Wills, 2019), histories that are still nurtured elsewhere including at home (Epstein, 2009).

Asian American (Hi)stories: Narrative Presence and Silencing

Japanese American incarceration is one of the few Asian American narratives that are included in official social studies curriculum in the United States (An, 2022). Yet, the narratives often presented in children’s literature, standards, and textbooks, although improved recently, are still abbreviated, sanitized, a brief caveat to U.S. exceptionalism, or untethered from racism and U.S. foreign policy (An, 2017; Camicia, 2009; Hawkins & Buckendorf, 2010). To address these challenges, educators have often looked to children’s literature as an effective pedagogical tool (Frye & Hash, 2013; Rodríguez, 2017; Soares & Wood, 2010). Some literary texts offer students access to more personal stories, such as those of Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu (Rodríguez, 2020a). Through the illustrations, students may be exposed to images of prison camps that have not been censored by the U.S. government. For example, the reality of watch towers with soldiers bearing guns figure far more prominently in recent children’s literature than they have in historical photographs by Ansel Adams that are highlighted in textbooks (Rodríguez & Kim, 2021).

Scholars such as Rodríguez (2020b) and Steve Camicia (2008) have added depth to this research by exploring the teaching of Japanese American incarceration as a “difficult history,” one that is seldom taught with the complexity or community support necessary for learning about such historical trauma. In Rodríguez’s (2020b) study, teachers made room for student understandings of injustice, but fell short of addressing racism directly. They opted, instead, to end their lessons with what Rodríguez refers to as “optimism” that would “maintain the status quo” (p. 29). In this way, the dominant or master narratives that shape student engagement with Japanese American incarceration remain intact.

The work of these and other scholars has highlighted not only the dearth of research around this topic, but also the possibilities and challenges of teaching Japanese American incarceration in classrooms. I build on their work by shifting the context to outside the traditional classroom and by focusing on how secondary students engaged with the history of Japanese American incarceration while volunteering at an archaeological dig at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The question I seek to answer is: How does participation in an archeological dig at Manzanar prison camp reveal and shape how students perceive the history of Japanese American incarceration?

Theoretical Framework

AsianCrit

Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit) emerged from critical race theory (CRT) as a branch that attended to the specific racializations of Asian Americans in legal theory and application (Chang, 1993; Gotanda, 1995; Matsuda, 1993). Sam Museus and Jon Iftikar first defined AsianCrit and its utility to education in 2014 (Museus & Iftikar, 2014), and again in 2018 (Iftikar & Museus, 2018). They present seven tenets that help explain the experiences, agency, and perceptions of Asian Americans in education, five of which will be presented first before attending to the two most pertinent to this study. The first tenet, “Asianization,” describes the positioning of Asian Americans across stereotypes that reify white supremacy: from forever foreigners to the recent re-emergence of the yellow peril (e.g., “diseased hordes”); from the hypersexualization of Asian women to the emasculation of Asian men. A second tenet, transnational contexts, speaks to the need for a broader contextualization of Asian American experiences beyond U.S. history and borders. This tenet states that imperialism and colonialism in Asia, as well as the continued negotiations and engagements between and across global Asian communities, are necessary to more fully understand Asian America. Similarly, the third tenet, intersectionality, acknowledges the multiple and simultaneous ways that different contexts, identities, and histories shape Asian American experiences. Fourth, strategic (anti)essentialism recognizes the many ways that Asian Americans have agency within their racialization. An acknowledged social construct, the designation of race and specifically “Asian American,” obscures the diversity within. Yet this obfuscation can be strategically used, as it was in the 1960s when student activists in California universities coined the term “Asian American” as a show of solidarity among those of Asian descent. And finally, the tenet of social justice emphasizes a commitment to fight and end all forms of oppression.

In the education system, the utility of AsianCrit is perhaps most prevalent in the aggregation of data across all Asians (Asian Americans of every ethnicity, as well as international students from Asia) (Goodwin, 2010; Paik et al., 2014). This, in part, has led to incredible harm for all communities of color as Asian students are labeled as a model minority. As the model minority stereotype took root in the 1960s, this led to many Asian American communities internalizing anti-Blackness while also lacking access to special education, mental health, and other social services. At the same time, the government and social commentary lauded Asian Americans as proof that racism was no longer a barrier to success for other communities of color. The trope of the model minority not only essentializes Asian American experiences, but also disregards the many transnational histories and immigration pathways (e.g., refugee status vs. an H-1B visa) for Asians, directly affecting their access to education and wealth before and after their arrival to the United States.

(Re)constructive History

There are two additional tenets of AsianCrit that I heavily draw upon for this study. The first, (re)constructive history, is premised on the absence of Asian Americans in U.S. history curricula. Although Iftikar and Museus (2018) refer to Asian Americans as “voiceless” (p. 940), this absence is perhaps more accurately described by Arundhati Roy (2004) as “deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard” (p. 1). Due to this silencing, histories must be reconstructed with Asian American narratives that are already present both in academia and in communities. For example, “relocation centers” were largely erased in local histories, as well as physically. Manzanar was one of the only relocation centers to receive official (i.e., government) recognition and support as a historical site, which only happened recently (Yam, 2023), and reconstruction and preservation were only possible following a highly politicized process. In this study, students walked among elements of the historical site that were literally reconstructed (e.g., barracks) and that they themselves were helping to reconstruct (i.e., excavation of the Children’s Village). Yet, as Hayashi (2003) noted of sites as pedagogical tools, they cannot stand alone. A more accurate history of Asian Americans must be (re)constructed in curriculum, whether in or out of the classroom.

Story, Theory, and Praxis

The second tenet, story, theory, and praxis, centers the experiences and stories of marginalized communities that disrupt the epistemological assumptions of white supremacy; that is, stories can “offer an alternative epistemology. . .and can inform theories and praxis in meaningful ways” (Iftikar & Museus, 2018, p. 941). Academic canons and research triangulation are not the only means by which theory and data can come together. A community that did not have access to archival preservation of their histories should not be regarded as less significant or trustworthy than those that did have access. Personal and family (hi)stories, for example, can be sites of theory, and can also drive action. This action, in turn, can lead to new stories and new theories.

Border Crossing

A question that must be considered alongside AsianCrit is: How does the application of theory shift as participants move between different places? For instance, (re)constructive history would likely look differently in counties like Los Angeles in California, where ethnic histories are already required for all students, as opposed to conservative counties like DeKalb in Georgia, where teachers are fired for incorporating such “divisive concepts.” As participants moved between physical and narrative spaces, I draw from border crossing (Giroux, 1991) to consider pedagogical applications of AsianCrit in this study.

Whether spatial or narrative, border crossing is an ideological crossing. Student ideologies become more exposed and engaged as they leave home, or what is familiar, and encounter a community presented as different from them in some way as the reason for the engagement. Ideological transformation, therefore, must also be considered. Henry Giroux (1991) brings up the possibility of ideological transformation by border crossing in education.

Students cross over into realms of meaning, maps of knowledge, social relationships and values that are increasingly being negotiated and rewritten as the codes and regulations that organize them become destabilized and reshaped. Border pedagogy decentres as it remaps. The terrain of learning becomes inextricably linked to the shifting parameters of place, identity, history, and power. (p. 511)

For Giroux, ideological shifts may occur when students encounter new or unfamiliar ideas, places, and people that will unsettle their set beliefs.

Expanding on Giroux’s border pedagogy, Thomas Philip (2011) writes of ideology in pieces, where the ideology one professes in one context may look different in another. In applying ideology in pieces to Giroux’s border pedagogy, the ideology that may be transformed when crossing borders may not necessarily stay transformed. In short, context matters when considering ideologies. At Manzanar, students engaged with a new place and narratives that, if centered in their entirety, could counter what they had always learned in schools. Yet, if exploring how students interact with histories when at reconstructed historic sites, this study must also examine what happens when those same students return home/to school.

Methods

Spatial Context: Indigenous Dispossession Allowed for Incarceration

Historian Julian Lim (2017) writes, “The first fact of the history of American immigration is genocide: the displacement and destruction of the Native peoples of North America. That is part of the story of immigration; it is not some other parallel history” (p. 17). Although Asian American history begins in Asia with western imperialism, complicity in settler colonialism in the United States must likewise be acknowledged. Thus, when attending to the spatial context of this study, it is important to recognize the Indigenous history of dispossession that allowed for the imprisonment of Japanese and Japanese Americans. This connection was immediately erased in official histories, including in the process of designating Manzanar, in the Owens Valley, as a historical site. The Paiute Tribes (Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe, Big Pine Paiute Tribe, and Bishop Paiute Tribe) begin their story in the Owens Valley long before the U.S. government designated land there for the tribes. By the 1860s, however, the land that had provided food and water for the Paiutes was taken over by white settlers who grazed their cattle on agricultural fields and diverted water used in Paiute irrigation systems (Piper, 2006).

With each encroachment, Paiute tribes resisted through warfare and legal action. Despite their efforts, the military and economic power of the United States led to the forced dispossession of land, first by white settlers and the California Volunteers (a military unit) in the 1860s, then to the 67,000-acre reservation designated by the federal government in the Owens Valley in 1912 (Kahrl, 1982, p. 353), and again in 1932 when “President Hoover revoked the 67,000 acres reserved land and placed the lands in watershed protection status for the City of Los Angeles” (Bishop Paiute Tribe, 2022). When Manzanar came under the protection of the NPS, the land belonged to the City of Los Angeles.

A decade later, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which forced the dispossession and removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast supposedly on the basis of “military necessity” (DeWitt, 1942). In reality, this removal was on the basis of race and racism (Civil Liberties Act of 1988). Japanese, who by U.S. law could not naturalize as citizens, as well as U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, were forced first into detention centers (e.g., horse stables), and then into prison camps throughout isolated areas in the United States. Manzanar held over 11,000 people between 1942 and 1945 across 540 acres, or less than 1 square mile of housing.

The current geographic boundaries of Manzanar and the surrounding region remain contested to this day. While the Paiute peoples were dispossessed of their land, Japanese and Japanese Americans were dispossessed by being placed onto the “emptied” land:

It purposefully and violently cleared the space of Indigenous peoples, who were contained to reservations to make room for settlers, and it was drained of water as the population of Los Angeles grew beyond its own supply. It was an “ideal” area to incarcerate Japanese Americans because the state had already made it that way. (Yamashita, 2016, p. 133)

Both communities, Indigenous and formerly incarcerated, came together to oppose plans by the city of Los Angeles for water and energy rights that would continue native dispossession and destroy the historical significance of the “carceral landscape” (Yamashita, 2016, p. 122). This relationship continues—there is acknowledgement of continued native dispossession by the Manzanar Committee, and recognition by the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe of a Japanese American chapter in the long history of violence in Owens Valley.

The spatial context of this study brings together Indigenous and Asian American histories, disrupting dominant narratives of place, history, and citizenship. Indigenous people are not “extinct” (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2002, p. 280), and tribal sovereignty remains a contested legal right (Grande, 2004; Sabzalian, 2019). Specific to this study, Japanese Americans were wrongfully incarcerated, not “interned” (Camicia, 2008; Rodríguez, 2017), and access to citizenship continues to be raced, classed, and exclusionary (Hsu, 2015; Ngai, 2004; Parker, 2015). These are all stories that are often “deliberately silenced, or. . .preferably unheard” (Roy, 2004) in school curriculum. Although the pedagogical application of this interwoven history is outside the scope of this study, it is important at least to acknowledge the historical and present realities of settler colonialism.

Research Context: St. Matthews Lutheran High School

This ethnographic study of St. Matthew’s Lutheran High School (pseudonym) took place in spring 2019. The school is a private parochial school in California with an enrollment of 1,351 in-person, online, and hybrid students. A racial and ethnic breakdown of students reveals 0.4% identifying as American Indian/Alaskan Native, 11.3% as Asian (this number is likely an aggregate of Asian international and Asian American students), 2.6% as Black, 11% as Hispanic, 56.6% as white, and 18% as multiracial. Overall, school demographics reveal that over 43% of the students identify as nonwhite/multiracial (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020), almost 13% higher than the school’s county population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). St. Matthew’s Lutheran is a predominantly white institution at the administrative and faculty levels. The school is associated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod denomination, which is 95% white, a percentage reflected in the school leadership (Pew Research Center, 2023).

The school is located in a historically conservative county. Politically, the county was instrumental in the rise of Nixon and Reagan Republicanism as well as the cultural conservatism on the West Coast of that era (Duchuk, 2011). In response to the perceived growth of West Coast liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s, evangelical southern migrants who moved west for wartime and postwar industrial opportunities joined the efforts of evangelists such as Billy Graham. A bastion of the Republican party since the Great Depression, 2016 was the first presidential election in 80 years in which the county voted Democrat, with the 2018 midterms providing a blue wave, or a “historic sweep of the conservative bastion” (Graham, 2018), reflecting increasing numbers of Latina/o and Asian American residents across class levels.

In a conversation with one of the participant teachers, she brought up an interaction she had with a parent at a football game about Calvary Lutheran sports switching from Nike to Adidas after the controversy around Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem during NFL games:

I don’t know the whole story, and I don’t know if it was actually because of the Kaepernick thing, but one of the dads said really proudly, “We’re an Adidas school!” I hope that’s not the reason and I hope that’s not the message being put out there. (Field notes, November 19, 2018)

Regardless of the actual reason for the change, the teacher clearly saw the possibility that the school, and many families, would openly oppose Kaepernick’s protest and stance, despite, as she pointed out, how that might affect “half the football team” who were students of color. Similar to the general faculty, all but one teacher who led the trip identify fully as white; however, these trips enroll more students of color than the school average. Yet, as the lead teacher stated in an interview, “I would say that people of color feel more comfortable in our program than other things, but does that mean they feel comfortable?” (Interview, January 7, 2019).

In spite of the higher number of students who identify as a person of color attending St. Matthews compared to the county, students of color in this study have shared the many ways they experienced racial violence at the school. In interviews across the larger research project in which this study took place (Kim, 2020), a pattern of targeted racism emerged. A Black student union was shut down by the founding members within a few weeks after conflicts with some administration who complained about their use of the Black Power fist as their symbol as well as with white classmates who harassed them, signing up as a joke and then asking, “Do white people matter?” An Arab American student spoke about how her Egyptian Coptic church was a safe haven from school in that she could freely speak Arabic and she would not have to endure the jokes from classmates about riding a camel to school. Although many of these same students spoke highly of some of administration, teachers, and classmates, these examples are indicative of shared experiences by participant students of color at St. Matthews.

Researcher Positionality

When I taught at St. Matthews, I was one of the only three Asian American teachers on the entire faculty of about 70. Within a year, one of them quit after having experienced racist taunts and threats from her students, including a video of her being blown up. As a witness to what she went through, and as a fellow Korean American woman, it was a painful year even if my own experience was mostly the opposite, though no less hurtful in the ways that racism surfaced. I taught Ancient History and Advanced Placement World History at St. Matthews for three years, during which I felt closely bonded with my students and incredibly supported by the vast majority of parents. When I returned as a researcher, many of my participants were the younger siblings of former students, and several chaperones were their parents. One of those parents was the lead teacher whose daughter had been my student for two years. We knew each other as colleagues, but at best were acquaintances. Yet, based on his reputation as a teacher who cared deeply for the environment and historical issues of justice, I felt comfortable asking for permission to conduct preliminary research in his classes a few years later for a graduate class I was taking after I had left the school. When I analyzed the initial data, I found that there was a racial divide in the class that corresponded with political ideologies. Religion was not a significant factor, as I had expected. I was unsure how the teachers would react, but I presented my analysis and interpretations without minimizing troubling findings. With the full understanding that I would be focusing on race and racism, and civic ideologies, they asked if I would continue my research, joining them on their trips.

Participants

For this specific study, I joined a group of 200 students, teachers, and parents (demographically similar to the overall school) as they traveled to an Indigenous reservation by invitation to join ongoing projects in the community. Projects were rarely determined until the students arrived and local communities requested specific numbers and skills. An alumna of St. Matthews had recently become a park ranger at Manzanar, and so upon our arrival, reached out for volunteers to help with an excavation. As a former teacher at St. Matthews Lutheran and as an Asian American woman studying Asian American histories, the lead teacher asked me to coordinate with the park rangers during the two full days at Manzanar. In my capacity as a participant chaperone, I worked with a smaller group of about 40 students and parents as they volunteered to help with an ongoing archaeological project currently excavating the Children’s Village, an orphanage. On the first day, after a brief orientation, students began work with the archaeologist. I arranged with the park rangers for our group to learn more about the site and the history, because the evening before most students had revealed that they were unfamiliar with Manzanar and had difficulty remembering the history of Japanese American incarceration. At the end of the second day, students toured the visitor center, which included a video of the general history of Japanese American incarceration, followed by a tour with a ranger who provided a more detailed story of Manzanar. A small group of students who had expressed interest then explored the reconstructed buildings.

Data Collection and Analysis

For this specific study, data was far more limited because my larger ethnography did not focus on Asian American narratives. Even our assignment to volunteer at Manzanar was a last-minute opportunity when the teachers reconnected with a former student who was a park ranger at the site. What led, in part, to this paper were the absences when coding for Manzanar and related Asian American narratives. Forty students and several parent chaperones spent two full days excavating and hearing stories about Japanese American incarceration, yet only one participant spoke of the experience to the larger group without being asked when outside the grounds of Manzanar. Thus, I primarily use data from field notes and recordings while at Manzanar paired with primary sources and disciplinary research to interpret how these narratives are often presented and/or disrupted by students and teachers.

I worked and slept alongside students and parents, taking field notes and completing audio-recorded informal and formal interviews. I recorded jottings throughout the day and filled in more complete field notes each evening after curfew. Every morning before student wake-up time, I added reflections from the previous evening’s field notes on a side column. Observation and data collection took place in condensed time and space with over 100 hours in this particular field site with participants (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Madison, 2012). Data also included observation notes and school video recordings of evening whole-group and then small-group meetings where students would talk about their day. These videos were made available after the trip, which I then transcribed. I met separately each evening with a small focus group of six young women assigned to me by the lead teacher. During the trip, I completed one or two semistructured interviews with focal participants (i.e., students in my chaperone group who brought up issues of race and racism on their own), each lasting between 30 minutes and 1 hour. One month following the trip, I had two follow-up interviews via FaceTime with one participant whose grandparents had been incarcerated during World War II.

I used Dedoose analytic software to code for themes. I completed “detailed, line-by-line initial coding” during the first read-through of all data (Saldaña, 2013, p. 101). Each subsequent analysis of data narrowed down codes that had multiple points of reference, or crystallization (e.g., common data in field observation notes, student artifacts, interviews), either combining codes or further defining them. Codes were also mapped by physical location, because literal border crossing was a significant part of this study. For example, coding for “counternarratives” was mapped onto “home/school” and “Manzanar.” After outlining initial interpretations, I member checked my analyses with at least one participant student whose story is included, one teacher who is one of the core leaders who planned the trip, and one parent who had volunteered on multiple trips. All participants and school names in this study have pseudonyms.

Findings

The first finding in this study is that the limited knowledge students had of Japanese American incarceration was tied closely to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, with little historical context. Secondly, being at Manzanar provided students with narratives that disrupted dominant notions of incarceration that erase Japanese American voices and positioned Executive Order 9066 as justified due to national security. A third finding in this study emerged from the family history of a focal participant, Peyton Tayama, whose stories revealed yet another disconnect between school curriculum and the stories of BIPOC families. And finally, when back at school, students of color noted hostility from white classmates when presented with counternarratives.

Pearl Harbor and War as Opportunity

The most common question I was asked during the trip by parents and students was, “What’s Manzanar?” Students recalled a general narrative of how incarceration fit within World War II; however, even among juniors and seniors, who had most recently learned the history, this recollection required some reminding when I first asked students, “How many [of you] know about Japanese American incarceration/internment?” Their knowledge was general and did not include Manzanar, the closest incarceration site to their home. As one participant described, “It’s always been there on the way to Mammoth [a popular ski resort in California], but no one noticed.”

When students related their understanding of a general narrative, many referred to the bombing of Pearl Harbor without understanding the historical context of U.S. foreign relations. They would then shift to the events at Pearl Harbor as the cause of and justification for incarceration. In one instance, during a lunch break on our first day at Manzanar, Peyton and I spoke about the difference between German concentration camps and incarceration camps. A white freshman male, Ethan, joined our conversation as we spoke about the causes of incarceration:

Ethan:

It’s not like the U.S. did anything to Japan. They just bombed us.

[Peyton and I looked at each other then turned to Ethan]

Peyton:

Uh, no. That’s not true.

Ethan:

Oh. Well, maybe we hurt their trade a little.

Author:

It’s more than that. For example, humiliating U.S. policies didn’t let Asians immigrate to the U.S. because they weren’t considered “assimilable.”

Ethan:

What? I never knew that! How come I never learned that? (Field notes, March 29, 2019)

In pointing out the importance of a transnational lens, Gary Okihiro (1994) wrote, “Asians didn’t come to America. Americans went to Asia” (pp. 28–29). Conversations like Ethan’s, at the beginning of our time at Manzanar, clearly show that the dominant narrative around Japanese American incarceration excludes Okihiro’s transnational perspective necessary to understanding the Asian experience in the United States, including Japanese American incarceration (Azuma, 2005). When narratives consistently place the bombing of Pearl Harbor in temporal proximity to incarceration without contextualization, the latter becomes a foreclosed and logical historical effect. Ethan recalled Pearl Harbor as the cause of incarceration, not the improved but still marginalized narratives textbooks sometimes include about “internment” being based on fear or racism, and ultimately as a security measure (Ogawa, 2004). Perhaps in part because the proximity of events is so consistent, to the exclusion of other perspectives, students in general tend to maintain a U.S.-centric narrative that posits the bombing of Pearl Harbor as an unprovoked attack on an innocent nation reluctant to engage in warfare. In essence, the connections that Ethan made with incarceration, and the causes of Pearl Harbor and World War II, were logical if based on what he had learned previous to Manzanar.

Regardless of how textbooks have shifted, Ethan’s narrative aligns with Sohyun An’s (2021) research that presents the ways U.S. wars are taught by featuring a nation “forced into conflict because there is no other solution except for violence to defend our people or to rescue other people who are suffering from evildoers” (p. 24). World War II has complex causes that cross multiple nation-states with imperial ambitions. And, wars have always been a tool for many, including the United States, to build up the nation-state, and to discipline perceived internal and external threats to itself. Historian Gary Gerstle (2001) further argues that wars are opportunities to legitimate wrongful government tactics in order to strengthen the nation-state (e.g., “discipline those deemed racially inferior” [p. 9]), as had happened with Executive Order 9066. Historian Naoko Shibusawa (2005) similarly notes that even when the United States was at war with Italy and Germany, there was an American narrative that differentiated between good and bad Italians and Germans. Not so for those of Japanese ancestry. “Most Americans did not believe that a Japanese counterpart to the ‘good German’ existed” (p. 264). The continued belief in the legitimacy of Japanese American incarceration by participants in this study reveals that this narrative has maintained dominance since 1942, in part by silencing deeper contextualization. As Ethan questioned of the absence in his schooling of U.S. racist immigration policies towards Japan pre–World War II, “How come I never learned that?”

Ethan’s question points to the necessity of (re)constructive histories as well as students’ openness to historical complexity. He was making a clear connection between what he had learned in school about World War II and what he saw at Manzanar. In this instance, Ethan shows that his participation at Manzanar did not initially shift his understanding that Pearl Harbor was a completely unprovoked attack that necessitated incarceration. Students were excavating one historical aspect of Manzanar, an orphanage. But without a more complete and direct picture of what happened before and after incarceration, or before and after the orphanage was built, students may have had a more difficult time deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative they had learned at school. When the dominant narrative is one that uses war to justify the incarceration of people based on race, the history must be reconstructed to tell a fuller and more complex story. Pearl Harbor cannot be the only reason Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated. U.S. wars must be taught with a more critical lens that upends the agenda of unquestioning patriotism. And when these two topics—racial discrimination and “good” wars—collide, as they often do in Asian American histories (e.g., Korean War, Vietnam War, Spanish-American War), narratives must be reconstructed to center the experiences, stories, and voices of those who have been silenced and unheard.

(Re)Constructive History Through Counternarratives

Learning the history of Japanese American incarceration at Manzanar, as opposed to within a traditional classroom space, afforded students opportunities to engage directly with counternarratives. Additionally, several students spoke of how being at Manzanar “made it more real.” That the “interactive” nature of their volunteer work was more effective “rather than just reading or hearing about it.” The tenet of (re)constructive history in AsianCrit literally took place as students walked among elements of the historical site that were physically reconstructed (e.g., barracks), and that they themselves were helping to reconstruct (i.e., excavation of the Children’s Village). A part of this reconstruction was also figurative, with counternarratives from the site itself and from people providing a more complex history.

On our first day, a park ranger emphasized the racism of Japanese American incarceration, a detail that the government itself acknowledged in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, but is often absent in school narratives. When conducting the orientation for students at the archaeological dig, the ranger clearly stated that Japanese American incarceration was “because of racism.” She led students on a reflection of where they were being asked to dig—the Children’s Village—and specifically the site of an orphanage at Manzanar. She asked, “Why would a baby or a young child who’s an orphan be a national threat?” (Field notes, March 29, 2019).

This narrative echoes the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, who opposed incarceration no matter how unpopular the sentiment at the time. Hired by the government to document the processes of incarceration, but heavily surveilled by the military, Lange included photographs that expressed the same question as the park ranger: How could a grandfather and young child be a national threat? Narratives that disrupt the justification of Japanese American incarceration are present at Manzanar, and they were also present when the event took place. Primary sources such as Lange’s photographs are easily accessible through the National Archives as public domain, but few classroom resources feature them in the way she had intended. Even with the availability of counternarratives in more mainstream spaces, students in this study had not encountered them until they came to Manzanar.

Several students continued to process and engage with these counternarratives as we explored the site. On the first day of the excavation, one student described how “eerie and hard it was to go to a place where something so horrible happened.” Urged by chaperones and teachers to be respectful of the history and space, this same student spent almost an hour with a small brush, carefully going over a space of 1.5 × 1.5 feet. She found a pencil that had been used until it was a stub with only lead and the metal eraser holder. She called people over to share what she had found. One of the park rangers asked her what it meant that she had found a pencil worn down to a nub. Her mouth turned down at the corners as she responded, “It means they had very little and what they did have, they used until it was all gone” (Field notes, March 29, 2019).

On our second day at Manzanar, a group of students requested time after excavation work to visit the barracks. While in the barracks, the students said nothing. They moved quietly around the rooms, reading signs, listening to recordings, and sometimes just staring at different objects and photographs. When we left and began walking back to the main building, they began to chat with each other. Two junior students, Willow and Grace, began processing what they had just learned:

Willow:

I know your dream is to work for a nonprofit in New York that specializes in human rights. So, what do you think about all this?

Grace:

What bothers me most is how they [U.S. government] covered it all up. That they didn’t even apologize until the 1980s. (Field notes, March 30, 2019)

A part of the dominant narrative of Japanese American incarceration in schools is that incarceration was a wartime necessity and that when the incarcerees began to be released in 1945, the story ended. Until students came to Manzanar, they did not learn that images of camp life were censored, that prison camps are still largely ignored as historical sites, and that in the 1980s, the U.S. government finally apologized and paid reparations to surviving former incarcerees. Returning to Robert Hayashi’s concern about the pedagogical utility of historical sites as limited when telling a complex story, sites that offer educational experiences that focus on disciplinary skills within history may mitigate that limitation (Schrum et al., 2016). However, even with such a focus, concerted attention must still be paid to ensuring that the content or the learned pedagogy is not problematic (e.g., “compet[ing] to extract seeds from cotton bolls” to learn about enslavement [p. 34]). Willow and Grace’s conversation echoes the possibilities of how historical sites that center counternarratives can facilitate a “reconsider[ation] of the past,” or an understanding that history is an ongoing negotiation of new information (Baron et al., 2020). I emphasize centering counternarratives because many historic sites reify dominant narratives or offer counternarratives as a separate tour (Smith, 2021).

School curriculum, like many historic sites, maintains a dominant narrative. With Japanese American incarceration, curriculum begins with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and ends with the closing of prison camps at the end of World War II, obscuring racist motivations, the continued racism that upholds that narrative, and the challenges the former incarcerees faced in starting their lives over. The literal (re)constructed histories at Manzanar facilitated new stories being constructed by students that offered them a far more complex understanding of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration. Alongside the place of Manzanar, “teachers” such as the park rangers and volunteers who had themselves been or had family incarcerated, were likewise integral to guiding students toward questions that gave sharper shape to the lives of the incarcerated, as well as the motivations of those in power who incarcerated. Students like Willow and Grace engaged with a more complete history of Manzanar than students like Ethan. Although all the students participated in the archeological dig, not all chose to learn or process the reconstructed narrative that was present in the site center or in the reconstructed barracks. This difference shows how student trips to sites such as Manzanar can both reinforce and disrupt the dominant narratives of history.

“My Family’s History”: How Story Informs Theory and Praxis

Using a small broom and a trowel, Peyton cleared the area and exposed a foundation stone for the orphanage. One of the park rangers knelt beside her and noted how careful and meticulous she was being. “You’re cleaning that off like an archaeologist would,” he told her. Peyton looked up at him and said, “My Nana was here.” (Field notes, March 29, 2019)

Being at Manzanar and not within school walls or even within the boundaries of home, students encountered more complex narratives from multiple sources: Indigenous teachers and leaders, park rangers, volunteers who themselves or whose families had been incarcerated, parents, and classmates. This was a space that facilitated the sharing of family stories that had otherwise been left out of the school space. Students were encouraged to listen to their stories, including the stories of classmates who also had personal connections to the site. One such focal participant, Peyton Tayama, whose grandparents had been incarcerated, embodies the AsianCrit tenet of story, theory, and praxis. On our first day at Manzanar, Peyton began sharing stories about her family’s history. Both her grandparents had been incarcerated as young children during World War II—her grandmother at Manzanar. As we spoke during our first lunch break, she became agitated and explained angrily that she had learned this history from home, not school. She put her thumb and forefinger close together to describe the short paragraph Japanese American incarceration receives in textbooks: “Not even a whole paragraph. Like really five sentences of the information. And it’s like because everyone’s so ashamed of it. So ashamed. Because they don’t want people to know about it.” She shared a story about how she challenged her teacher in elementary school to teach the topic more substantially because “even the teachers don’t know that much information. And that bothered me so much.” But when she shared what she had learned at home with her teacher, her teacher responded with a condescending “uh-huh” and Peyton felt “brushed off” (Field notes, March 29, 2019).

She took up a similar stance as we left the archaeological site. When she and her classmates walked through the visitor center and museum, Peyton pointed out her Nana’s name on a list of all individuals who had been incarcerated. At the whole group meeting that same evening, Peyton stood up in front of over 200 classmates, teachers, and parents. She briefly described the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and our work at Manzanar. She went on to explain:

The U.S. doesn’t want you to know these stories. But it’s my family’s history. Teachers never teach it. The U.S. is embarrassed by it. They see it as a mistake.. . . But my Nana’s name is on the list.. . . So now you’re aware. (Field notes, March 30, 2019)

Historically and presently, the histories of communities of color have been silenced, marginalized, or twisted to fit into a narrative of racial progress in the official curriculum (Brown & Au, 2014). These histories instead live and lived at home and with families (Epstein, 2009; Givens, 2021). The same rang true for Peyton. In this case, her grandparents offered a different narrative than what she had learned (or not learned) at school. Her grandmother, born a U.S. citizen, spoke of her experiences as a young child at Manzanar, and of her memories of being called a “Jap” after Peyton herself was called the same by a classmate seven decades later. Her grandfather had repressed all memories of incarceration (“And why wouldn’t he?,” Peyton asked), until one night when Peyton was still a young child, he awoke crying and told her grandmother, “I remember everything.” From that night on, her grandparents made sure to share their stories, believing that God had led him to remember so that others might hear what had happened to them.

These histories that Peyton learned at home made her cognizant of their absences—or what was “deliberately silenced”—in school curriculum. When analyzing data, Manzanar was mentioned only by Peyton during the trip outside the context of the question, “What’s Manzanar?” Once back home, Peyton was again the only participant to bring up “Manzanar” and “incarceration” during follow-up interviews, member checks, and other observations at the school site. She understood that this is purposeful (“the U.S. is embarrassed by it”) and so acted to make her family’s history known. In other words, her family’s story informed her theories of U.S. history education and led to her action/praxis to disrupt the dominant narrative for her schoolmates.

Back at School: The De-Construction of Counternarratives

Manzanar provided a unique opportunity for (re)constructive history that was effective in presenting counternarratives that disrupted dominant stories of Japanese American incarceration. When speaking at Manzanar, Peyton pointed out that the site had recently chosen to uncover more of these histories, stating, “. . .when I went there five to six years ago they weren’t doing any of it. I want to share my story.” However, when narratives are confined by place and absent from official curriculum, can the AsianCrit tenet of story, theory, and praxis be enacted for those who, unlike Peyton, can later remove themselves from these narratives both physically and psychologically?

McKnight and Chandler (2009) observed that when white students engage with counternarratives in the classroom, they nonetheless uphold dominant narratives of whiteness and patriarchy. “Students. . .easily gravitate. . .toward replicating this type of information [dominant narratives] without being directed” (p. 68). Similarly, Peyton and other students of color expressed doubt that counterstories would significantly impact their classmates and teachers. Their evidence was their own experiences after returning to the borders of home/school. Several months after the trip, Peyton had to fight with her art teacher to use her grandmother’s story of incarceration as the subject for a project on horror. Even after Peyton had to explain what incarceration was, her white female teacher was unconvinced that such a subject constituted true horror. All students of color who were interviewed as a part of the whole project had multiple stories of racism and microaggressions at school that made evident white supremacy at micro and macro levels. Students shared their fears of speaking their home language (e.g., Arabic), or having to endure racist jokes or even outright physical violence. One senior who identified as Black and Latinx spoke of being labeled a “bad student” when he had his test Scantron returned because he had filled in two races instead of one.

Amina, a Black woman in her senior year who was also on the trip, expressed frustration during an interview with how her classmates received stories of racialized “others,” including herself within that category, when international students from East Asia led chapel at school:

Amina:

Like a lot of kids are like, “Oh, I don’t understand why we’re doing. . .”. Like they just don’t care. Really! They just don’t get it!

Author:

And you would hear those remarks?

Amina:

Um-hm. And it’s like. . .kind of like hurts a little bit. (Interview, January 10, 2019)

If students were resistant to the stories of Asian international students, Peyton had reason to hesitate when she was asked to speak about her family’s history during chapel after the Manzanar trip. After Peyton decided to participate, she asked me if we could discuss what she was planning. Much of our time together was talking about some of the fears she had about speaking at chapel. For example, instead of using “incarceration,” Peyton chose the more palatable “relocation.” Part of her fear stemmed from an understanding of acceptable narratives at school that was similar to Amina’s. She had also brought up the Asian international students who had led chapel and how it was poorly received:

. . .talking about their heritage and their stories of where they’re from and what’s

happened there. But the only difference with my story. . .mine would be also including like most of the population in my school that are white. So it’d be them and myself, which might not be something that they might want. (Interview, May 31, 2019)

Peyton’s awareness of the difference between her story and those of international students suggests that when counternarratives are bounded to a place outside of home, as they are at Manzanar, students are affected. But the same students are also able to keep injustice, complicity, and responsibility bounded. That is, Thomas Philip’s ideology in pieces applies in this instance of border crossing. Ideological transformation may be possible, as Giroux theorizes, but whether those transformations will survive crossing back, whether out of a classroom space or a counternarrative, and back into the dominant curriculum, is a legitimate concern. Peyton and Amina clearly foresaw this challenge within school borders. They understood that stories, such as Peyton’s, bring the complicity closer to home, and so sets them up to bear the pain of indifference, anger, or retaliation from their classmates.

Discussion

In this study I examined how high school students engaged with narratives of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration while border crossing into a complex space with both Indigenous and carceral histories. The choice of words, content, and the spaces in which learning took place must be carefully considered. An analysis of the emergent narratives through the lens of AsianCrit and border crossing focuses on both content and space, and reveals the challenges and the possibilities of teaching Asian American histories that have already been co-opted into dominant narratives that obscure white supremacy and reify the U.S. nation-state. AsianCrit puts forth the necessity of (re)constructive histories that attend to silenced and marginalized voices in social studies classrooms. The discourse, narratives, and primary sources for reconstructing incarceration have been made available to the public over the last few decades, whether through Densho (an online encyclopedia of Japanese American incarceration), Roger Daniels, the photographs of Dorothea Lange, the scholarship of Asian Americanists, or children’s literature. Yet when we enter social studies spaces, those resources fall within Arundhati Roy’s (2004) description of being “preferably unheard.” If social studies educators continue to ignore both calls to move away from problematic discourse (i.e., “internment”) and the personal and transnational narratives of incarceration, there will be little in the way of preventing yet another tragedy motivated by “racial prejudice and wartime hysteria” (Civil Liberties Act of 1988). As history has shown repeatedly, the link between incarceration and “military necessity” is one that is perpetuated not only in social studies classrooms but also in broader society. Currently, parts of the Muslim ban, which discriminates against religious identity, remain in place in U.S. immigration policy based on the same legal argument that rendered incarceration legitimate during World War II.

(Re)constructive histories of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration can also disrupt a view of history as a series of foreclosed causes and effects without any attention to the many other possible narratives that could have taken place. The stories of resistance (e.g., Fred Korematsu, the no-no boys, Toyo Miyatake) all offer alternatives to what the nation-state chose. Yet, in most classrooms, Executive Order 9066 is presented solely as a “necessity,” as a direct effect of Pearl Harbor. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the U.S. government itself named “racial prejudice” as one of the main causes of incarceration, is rarely a part of the narrative, as Willow and Grace noted in their conversation after visiting the barracks. Without considering what might have been in history, without “returning to the past its gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and illusions,” we limit what we can “imagine [as] different futures for what lies ahead” (Lowe, 2015, p. 175)—thus, the well-known adage, “history repeats itself.” Fred Korematsu understood this as Islamophobia, which post-9/11 became rooted in policy; this led him to file an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of detainees in Guantanamo. In that amicus brief, he and his lawyers outline a long history of the U.S. government wrongfully suspending civil liberties based on military necessity and national security. Educators are uniquely positioned to unravel the construction of such histories that serve only to strengthen the nation-state to the harm of marginalized communities.

Returning to Sylvia Wynter (1994), she describes “mainstream scholars” in ways that apply directly to teachers at all levels. Drawing from anthropologist Asmarom Legesse, she details their role in maintaining the current political, economic, and social orders; or as,

grammarians of our order; that is, as ‘men and women’ who are well-versed in the ‘techniques of ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is completely consistent with the system of values. . .of the society to which they belong. . .which we rework and elaborate in order to. . .regulate their [society’s] behaviors, for both enormous good and evil. (p. 55)

Teachers are likewise “grammarians of our order,” tasked with maintaining the official narratives that uphold the nation-state and white supremacy above all else. Yet, as Wynter notes, upholding a framework can also do “enormous good.” The framework that can do so, however, is one that Wynter suggests connects itself to the marginalized, to those who can make visible the constructed nature of our ideologies and so shake their foundations. Such reconstructive histories can both expose an ideology and “give an account of the existence of alternatives and possibilities. . .” (Lowe, 2015, p. 175). Teachers then are tasked with ensuring that their pedagogy intentionally does all three: identifies, deconstructs, and reconstructs. Without identifying ideologies and their constructed nature, students may not be open to other possibilities, perceptions, or narratives. Without deconstructing ideologies or narratives that harm others, students may force reconstructed narratives to fit their own worldviews.

The necessity of deconstructing dominant ideologies was all the more evident as students crossed borders into and out of reconstructed histories in this study. What was possible in one space was not safe in another. Although visiting historical sites with students does not always counter dominant narratives, in this instance border crossing into a complex space like Manzanar that acknowledges multiple narratives ultimately meant that students like Peyton could do the same. Yet crossing back to school precluded this possibility for her. Her speech at the school chapel was a tempered version of what she said at Manzanar. Instead, Peyton spoke more about how “God works in mysterious ways” by putting her on a team that went to Manzanar. Border crossing then, as Giroux describes and hopes for, must attend not only to what happens outside home borders but also to how crossing back and forth between borders shapes stories and ideologies. Border crossing as a pedagogical move must include a recognition of the constructed nature of borders, the nature of the border being crossed, and a deconstruction of borders that distort stories to fit into already dominant ideologies in schools.

Conclusions and Implications

As states such as Illinois, Connecticut, and New Jersey have required the inclusion of Asian American studies in K–12 classrooms, grassroots and legislative efforts have gained traction in other states. At the same time, another wave of legislation continues to restrict teaching to white, Christian nationalist, cisgender, and heteronormative narratives. Peyton silencing herself at chapel for fear of her white classmates being made to feel complicit is indicative of current legislation that does not allow for any teachings that make white students uncomfortable. Yet those are often the stories of Indigenous students and students of color that tell a more accurate and complex history of a settler colonial nation-state with imperial ambitions. Without these narratives, the United States remains a beacon and defender of democracy both at home and abroad, and students are trained to be unquestioning patriots and nationalists, content with the status quo of war and violence. If Asian American histories are to become a greater part of the dominant curriculum, as mandates or not, we have a responsibility to ensure that the curriculum and its implementation attend to the truth of U.S history that would allow students to consider whether their nation is living up to its ideals and even if those ideals are their own. As educators, we must attend to how counternarratives can be centered in our teaching to disrupt what is offered in legislation, textbooks, standards, and popular but highly problematic online lesson platforms (Brown et al., 2023). The recent passage of House Bill 1537 in Florida shows the consequences of uncritically advocating for Asian American (counter) narratives. The bill mandates the teaching of Japanese American incarceration, but alongside the “contributions” of Asian Americans. “Contributions” alone, without attention to power and oppression, is yet another type of euphemism in education that erases the lived experiences of students like Peyton and Amina. The bill’s passage was also at the expense of continued attacks and restrictions on Black histories and LGBTQ+ students in Florida, which runs counter to the solidarity work of many former Japanese American incarcerees.

Legal and/or curricular inclusion of Asian American histories, although imperative, is an important initial step to addressing the discursive, political, and even physical violence we have seen historically and currently. As educators and researchers, we must continue to question and disrupt curriculum that erases Asian American narratives, but do so in a way that considers not only the content, delivery, and spatial context, but also how students themselves take up or reject the stories. Official and counternarratives, both positive and harmful, are derived not only from schools but also from discourses in media, social media, and literature, all of which are as publicly available as the resources for counternarratives for incarceration described earlier. Students do not have to be in a classroom, or even at a historic site, to engage with them. It is imperative that teachers still be aware of their influence and impact on the stories students take in as truth because those stories often determine how they will engage with counternarratives, if at all. In particular, we must pay attention to how students of color are harmed or tokenized by how their classmates engage with narratives both in and outside classrooms. Teachers can then carefully consider how Asian American (hi)stories are being told often adjacent to dominant curricula in order to understand what must be disrupted and how.