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We all have little bytes of data that make up our particular identity in this world.\u00a0 I remember when I was in seminary, and we held an exercise in diversity during orientation.\u00a0 We were to step forward if we identified with various experiences.\u00a0 One experience that stuck with me was \u201cI or someone in my family have been incarcerated.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course I let it go by.\u00a0 I come from a family of ministers and schoolteachers; hardly the jailbird types!\u00a0 But then it occurred to me that my mother and many family members were incarcerated in World War II internment camps; in fact one cousin was born in the camp.\u00a0 I was paralyzed by the dilemma\u2014I can\u2019t step forward as if my family were imprisoned, as if one of my relatives had run aground of the law.\u00a0 They hadn\u2019t done anything wrong!\u00a0 But that\u2019s what has happened to so many people of color; they are accused of wrongdoing and imprisoned, often without any proof but for the color of their skin.<\/p>\n
Like most people, I refer to the camps that imprisoned 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of whom were citizens (like my mother, who had never even stepped foot out of the US), as \u201cinternment camps.\u201d\u00a0 But some people call them concentration camps, a term defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary<\/em> as \u201ca place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard\u201d\u2014though they point out that the term has often been used to refer to Nazi death camps, which has caused much sensitivity about the use of the term.\u00a0 You probably have heard that this term has been used most recently to describe the detention centers holding asylum seekers from Central America.<\/p>\n As it turns out, there are some similarities.\u00a0 Last Thursday night, I attended an event in Little Tokyo, protesting the use of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as a detention center for migrant children from Central America.\u00a0 Fort Sill is still an active Army post, first staked out in 1869.\u00a0 But it has also been used for detention.\u00a0 In 1894, Geronimo and 341 other Apache were kept at Fort Sill as prisoners of war; in fact, Geronimo died there in 1909.\u00a0 During World War II, 700 Japanese-American immigrants (we call them issei,<\/em> or first generation) were held there.\u00a0 Three of the issei<\/em> died at Fort Sill, including Kanesaburo Oshima.\u00a0 He was taken to Fort Sill from Hawai`i.\u00a0 His wife and eleven children were left at home, and he suffered a mental breakdown.\u00a0 Unarmed, he attempted to climb the barbed wire fence, and was shot dead by a guard.<\/p>\n And now, there is a plan to detain as many as 5,000 children at Fort Sill.<\/p>\n Japanese-Americans have always sworn \u201cnever again\u201d to this kind of mass incarceration\u2014not only for Japanese-Americans, but any people detained without trial.\u00a0 (Of course, even if there was a trial, we ordinarily do not hold children accountable for the actions of adults caring for them.)\u00a0 So we feel called to speak up whenever we see others being persecuted for being a member of an ethnic or religious group deemed undesirable.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have been impressed with the strong positive response to Kristi Van Nostran\u2019s ministry as Immigrant Accompaniment Organizer.\u00a0 My guess is that many of us have been wondering how to help with this crisis.\u00a0 Kristi has many different ways you or your church can help, so I encourage you to contact her.\u00a0 You can scroll down for a flyer on her work.\u00a0 And Presbyterian News Service wrote an article on our ministry, which is on-line here<\/a>.<\/p>\n