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VY: And you know, in addition to the importance of that, I wonder if you can speak a little bit to the healing power of the camps and the importance of the preservation work.

DS: Yeah, yeah. But just going back to the pilgrimage, Dan invited us, my wife and daughter, to go to the first pilgrimage, and that's the only one I've gone to. But that was shortly after... well, that was the first pilgrimage, and I recall Dan speaking during the luncheon, and he mentioned something that really stuck with me. He said he was very fortunate to be at the right time and the right place to have an effect, to have an influence on the outcome. And that it's very important to be in the right time at the right place and to do the right thing. So it was gratifying to go back to Minidoka with my family, with my daughter, to look at the barracks, to listen to my son speak about his experience. And it was really an act of healing. It was a, not only an act of healing, but it was a real sense of camaraderie, a commonality of experience. And one thing I remember vividly is it was a session of just sitting around telling stories, camp stories. And it was wonderful because there was a sense of shared experience. I don't think there was a sense of bitterness or sadness, but just a sense of shared experience and it really led to this feeling of healing that whenever, whatever psychic injury or concerns is now healed, it's gone. And we talked about the long-term effects of the internment, but the pilgrimage really offers a place of healing, a place of solitude. Because it is, my gosh, a desolate place. And we spent a portion of our life, however brief, in that place. And the toll that it took is incalculable. It's hard to measure the full extent of the internment experience, but the monument is available for people to experience it, but also a place for healing.

VY: You know, that's a really powerful description of the importance of preserving the sites and the pilgrimages. And it really emphasizes, to me, it emphasizes how it's really for, if people ask, well, who is it for, is it for the people who experienced this or their families, or is it for the general public? And you know, I think it's for everybody, but really specifically, it has such a powerful, I think, importance for the families who have this in this ancestry of having people in their family who have gone to one of these camps. And there are different kinds of relationships that they have with the camp itself. And I like how you described how it is really more of a healing experience, not so much an experience of feeling bad. Even though this horrible thing happened there, but it's more about remembering the space and the people that you were with all this time, that one really strong shared experience that shaped so many people and so many generations of people.

DS: Right. And that experience had, I'm beginning to appreciate the long-lasting effects of the internment. And it's not to denigrate other people's life experiences, but this is our experience, this is our group experience. It's a hundred and ten Japanese Americans, Aleutian Americans, Canadian, Peruvian Americans. This is our communal experience, and it's a story that needs to be told. So coming back to the last decade or two, I have a friend who is a playwright, and her name is Rosanna (Yamagiwa) Alfano. she lives right off the Harvard campus, or her husband, I'm sorry, was a professor at Harvard. She wrote a play, it's entitled Don't Fence Me In. And as part of our effort to tell the internment story, that play was read at several locations including the Cambridge Center, and where a number of plays relating to minority groups were read. And I was asked to read the part in Rosanna (Yamagiwa) Alfano's play, Don't Fence Me In. And in addition to speaking on television or before public groups, students and the like, I read Rosanna's play, which was about a husband, an elderly husband who was very crabby, and a son who wanted to enlist in the army, and the turmoil that it caused while living in the camps. But I think about the phrase, the song "Don't Fence Me In." And coming back to the issues today where the Minidoka community as well as others are fighting to prevent the development of an extremely large wind farm that's almost adjacent to the boundaries of the camp. And I'm just outraged that the nearest wind tower, which could be as high as seven hundred feet high, would be within a mile of my home in Barracks 15, Building 8, Room E. What an outrage it is to have such a monstrosity right adjacent to my home. And my spirit, my family's spirit, my experience still resides on that spot. And it's an outrage to have that monstrosity marching up, essentially, to my front door.

VY: You know, when I hear you talk about it that way, what strikes me, it's as if these spaces are really sacred ground.

DS: Yes, there's sacred ground, but there's part of me, part of my family, part of my mother and father that are still there. And it's unacceptable to have what we consider as sacred ground, to be spoiled by a corporation that is designed to make money off the backs of those who have to bear the burden. And as a former investment banker, I'm keenly aware of the power of capitalism, of making money, and how that may have unintended consequences. But I also understand that the prime evil force that drives these hedge funds, these privately held hedge funds, to maximize their return off the backs of whoever stands in their way. And I hope that we are able to survive this assault this assault by this monstrosity.

VY: That's really powerful.

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