STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Learn about the Minidoka Internment Camp during a free lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18.
Dr. Russ Tremayne, a professor at the College of Southern Idaho Learn about the Minidoka Internment Camp during a free lecture Twin Falls campus, will discuss the history of what’s also known as the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the lecture. The lecture will be held at the College of Southern Idaho Blaine County Center.
Minidoka, designated as a U.S. National Park Service National Historic Site, housed more than 9,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to leave their homes to move to remote relocation centers in the West. One of those included Minidoka, which is a mere 70 miles from Hailey.
The Japanese Americans sent there lived behind barbed wire under surveillance by guard towers.
Tremayne, a history professor for more than 30 years, recently published a book titled “Surviving Minidoka,” which received the Idaho Library Association Book of the Year award. The book contains more than 200 photographs and paintings, while confronting questions of patriotic compliance and constitutional rights.