Twenty educators from Missoula-area schools attended the first traveling workshop conducted by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) and its partners at the University of Montana on Saturday.

Conducted at the University Center, the workshop introduced teachers to the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, which included the detention of first-generation Japanese immigrants at the camp at Fort Missoula. Along with joining educator and author Susan Kamei of the University of Southern California, teachers also toured the museum at Fort Missoula. 

It was the opening workshop in a three-year series of traveling educator workshops and public events in a program led by HMWF and sponsored by a grant from the Norman Y. Mineta Japanese American Confinement Education program of the National Park Service (NPS).

Saturday’s workshop followed a presentation by Paul Richter, author of the new book “The Distance Between Our Names: The Untold History of America’s War on Japanese Immigrants.” Richter presented a dialogue on the Japanese immigrant experience Friday at the UC Center at the University of Montana.

A longtime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Richter detailed the difficulties Japanese immigrants faced in a United States whose residents were often hostile to Asians.

The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula is one of four HMWF partners in Exiled to the Rockies: Japanese American incarceration during World War II, the NPS workshop series. The other partners include the Amache Alliance of Colorado, Friends of Minidoka in Idaho and the Topaz Museum of Utah. Amache, Minidoka, Topaz and Heart Mountain were four of the 10 incarceration camps that imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, during World War II.