Specialists to Speak at Colorado State University on the Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans in Colorado

The internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans in the 1940s will be discussed when Gwenn Jensen and Lane R. Hirabayashi present the "Hidden Legacies of Mass Incarceration." The program begins at noon on Feb. 17 in the Lory Student Center, Room 214, and is free and open to the public. The program will begin with a brief overview of Japanese-American history. Jensen then will present short- and long-term health impacts of mass incarceration. Hirabayashi will then discuss the "resettlement" of Japanese Americans in Colorado during the 1940s.

After the attack at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which allowed military commanders to designate areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions and placed in guarded camps.

Hirabayashi is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado- Boulder. He also serves as the coordinator of Asian-American studies and is a member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology. Hirabayashi is the author of four books, including "Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona" and "The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp," featuring Asian-American culture and the social life within this culture. He also works with a wide range of community-based organizations.

Jensen is an independent scholar and consulting anthropologist who earned a doctorate at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research interest includes health legacies concerning historical trauma. She is writing "The Prince of Betrayal: Health Consequences of the Japanese American Internment" and compiling a volume of life histories of Japanese-Americans detailing their wartime experiences.

For more information, contact Irene Vernon at (970) 491-6839 or the Center for Applied Studies in American Ethnicity at (970) 491-2418.