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MA: You know, I just wanted to know if there's anything else you'd like to share, or any thoughts that you have?

CT: No, but there's one thing that I experienced that sometimes I can share and talk about it and sometimes not. But I'd at least like to kind of try to share, because my memory of it impacted how I deal with the children that I work with.

MA: Sure.

CT: But I always thought that I didn't remember very much about camp except the heat and things like that. And there was an incident that happened in Colorado when the students were protesting the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia. And in Denver, they had a march down one of the major streets and they were protesting that. And then, after the march was over, they didn't want to kind of give it up. And this was during the '70s, when students were protesting all over the country. So they marched to the campus of University of Denver, and they set up kind of a shantytown that they called Woodstock West. And the kids were sitting around smoking pot. And I remember walking through -- and I was in school at that time. I was married and had children, but I went back to school to finish getting my degree. And walking through the students that are all playing their guitars and singing and everything, I couldn't figure out why something smelled so funny. And the other students who were much younger said, "That's 'cause you're inhaling pot." [Laughs] And I thought that was a funny experience for me, a mom and two kids, going back to school and walking through this crowd with pot. But the students wouldn't disperse and the mayor said, "You need to go back to your schools and go back home." And they wouldn't disperse and so he called the police to come out and they had tear gas, trying to make the students go away. Well, as soon as the tear gas... the students fled. Soon as the tear gas cleared away, the students came back again. And it, I think for them it was just really a fun experience. But by then, it was starting to get out of hand and it was kind of unsanitary because they were just camped out in the middle of the campus. So the governor called out the National Guard and said that they were going to move in and tear the shanty little cardboard houses down and make the students disperse.

So, I was sitting in a statistics class because I was in grad school. And the building was a former army barracks and was sort of like what we lived in when we were in camp. It was kind of the same plan. And I looked up in the stat class and I saw the units of National Guard soldiers walking by, and it triggered a memory. And I jumped up and said, "Oh, no. It's happening again." And I started crying and I ran down to the bathroom. But when I got there, I thought, "Why did I say that?" And then some of the female students followed me and they said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I don't know." But that, seeing the soldiers marching by, reminded me of something from my childhood. And then years later, when I was talking to a friend of mine who's a mental health worker, she said that it was kind of probably like a post-traumatic stress syndrome. That, "You were young enough that you didn't have enough language to experience, I mean to express fear, or something, but the memory of the incident was buried within you." And so that really helped me understand. And that's when I kind of also, about the same time realized about the, why I couldn't stand the smell of canned milk, because it triggered more of an emotional memory rather than kind of a conscious one.

And so, I've sort of kept that experience in the back of my mind, but it really did help me. I think I shared before that, when I was teaching at the University of Denver and running their therapeutic preschools, I had a class of children that had been sexually abused, that were coming to us, they were bused in from another county. And students would say, "Why is that child, why are they there? The incident to them happened when they were babies or children." And I said, "No, you need to understand that the memory still is there, but they didn't have the language at that time to express anything, but that's why they're acting out now when they're four and five." And then of course, we had psychologists that were working with us, with the children, and then they would be called in when the children got to a point where it was really uncomfortable for them. So I think that my own experience helped me understand in later life how things that happened to people when they were children really do, they don't go away. So I was very interested in Satsuki Ina's work when she made the film Children of the Camps.

MA: Can you talk a little bit more about the, about that film?

CT: A film... she took a group of people who had had camp, the background in their experience, in their background, when they were younger. And they went to a retreat, and I don't know whether it was over the weekend or not, but the film was very powerful. Because as they sat and talked, it sort of brought out that that experience really did affect how they reacted to situation as they were adults. But I guess if you don't stop and think about it, you don't get that connection. But that was a powerful experience for me. And like I said, I can talk about it today, but there are other times when I can't talk about it.

MA: And I think that children, you know, internalize a lot more than we think that they do.

CT: I think children do internalize more than we as adults realize. That what happens to them, whether it's a positive or a negative, they still don't have the language to express it. But it doesn't mean that it didn't happen, or that they forgot about it.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.