U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan leads the National Archives, which oversees billions of government documents, photos, & records. But instead of educating the public about WWII incarceration & other dark chapters of American history, Shogan has spent the last year erasing history. Shogan instructed employees to erase references to Japanese American incarceration from educational materials & ordered the removal of Dorothea Lange’s photos of WRA camps from a planned exhibit at the National Archives Museum — claiming it was too negative and controversial.

Photographer Toyo Miyatake was born #OTD in 1895 in Kagawa prefecture, Japan. He came to the United States in 1909 with his mother and two brothers to rejoin his father who had left Japan two years earlier and started a confectionary shop in Los Angeles. Miyatake became interested in photography, studying under Harry K. Shigeta and Edward Weston. He was married in 1922 to his wife Hiro, and opened the Toyo Miyatake Studio in Little Tokyo in October 1923.

#OTD in 1944, the Denaturalization Act was signed into law — ironically paving the path for thousands of Japanese Americans to be stripped of their US citizenship and deported to Japan, on the eve of the Fourth of July. The law was a response to unrest in the camps fueled by the disastrous “loyalty questionnaire” and the restoration of the draft for Nisei. The government had not expected incarcerated Japanese Americans to use the questionnaire as a means of protest.

This #LaborDay we’re highlighting some lessons in solidarity from Japanese and Mexican Americans’ 100+ years of shared farm labor history. 🧵 densho.org/catalyst/japan… While the two groups were on opposing sides in many of these encounters, there were also remarkable instances of unity—like the multiracial union organizing that formed the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association in turn-of-the-century Oxnard, California.

Fort Sill is a place layered in trauma. Japanese Americans were incarcerated there during WWII, and one inmate was shot & killed trying to escape. It also housed a Native American boarding school where children were separated from their families. time.com/5605120/trump-… It also served as a Prisoner of War camp for members of the Chiricahua Apache tribe who were forcibly relocated from the Southwest to Fort Sill in 1894. okhistory.org/publications/e…