When John Hopper, dean of students for the Granada School District, began teaching his history students about Camp Amache in the early 1990s, the site was a sage-brush strewn prairie
Remains of the Amache internment camp, approximately one mile southwest of Granada, Colorado.
The coronavirus pandemic has stalled the push to establish the Amache internment camp in southeastern Colorado as a unit of the National Park System. The Colorado Sun reports the crisis has stifled the normal schedule of public comment and wreaked havoc on the prescribed timeline.
At first, the trip unfolded as just an academic tracing of family history.
John Tonai had for years heard the stories from his father, Minoru, about the Amache internment camp in southeastern Colorado, where the U.S. government transported thousands of Japanese Americans from California and held them behind barbed wire and guard posts for three years during World War II. The family lore became a constant soundtrack that, over time, receded to a kind of background noise always heard, seldom absorbed.
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A sign marks the location where Block 26 barracks were located at Manzanar National Historic Site in California on December 9, 2015.
For the Amache site, in Colorado, effort on the federal level officially began in late 2019 with the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, but the COVID-19 crisis stifled the normal schedule of public comment and wreaked havoc on the prescribed timeline.
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
At first, the trip unfolded as just an academic tracing of family history.
John Tonai had for years heard the stories from his father, Minoru, about the Amache internment camp in southeastern Colorado, where the U.S. government transported thousands of Japanese Americans from California and held them behind barbed wire and guard posts for three years during World War II. The family lore became a constant soundtrack that, over time, receded to a kind of background noise always heard, seldom absorbed.