September 16, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Vice President Harris:
We appreciate your acknowledgement that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is an “act that we cannot forget … it is only by understanding our past that we build a better future.” In light of efforts to erase AANHPI heritage, we are grateful for the Biden Harris Administration’s whole of government commitment to equity, justice and opportunity for the AANHPI community and its August 2024 commitment to protect places “that help tell a more complete story of our nation’s history, including by recognizing difficult moments that have been
ignored or obscured for far too long.”
The undersigned 45 Japanese American, Asian American and allied organizations write to ask you to protect the Minidoka National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System, from the Lava Ridge wind project. On June 7, 2024, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) with a preferred alternative that would violate racial, environmental and reparative justice, while rejecting protections from future threats.
We urge you to intervene to prevent permanent damage to Minidoka, the Japanese American community and AANHPI heritage before BLM signs the Record of Decision (ROD) in the next few weeks.
Established as a National Monument by President Clinton and expanded via bipartisan Congressional support to include the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial on Bainbridge Island, Minidoka tells the story of the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans from the Pacific Northwest, California and Alaska during World War II, painful family separations in New Mexico and Montana, the military service of Nisei soldiers and the courage of those who resisted. Minidoka, as well as the other nine War Relocation Authority Centers, and numerous Assembly Centers, DOJ internment camps, and army facilities, are now sacred ground for Japanese American and Alaska Native survivors, descendants, veterans and their families who were forcibly relocated to these sites during the war.
We support renewable energy and fighting climate change without disproportionate negative impacts on people of color. We are deeply disappointed that the BLM’s preferred alternative would have “disproportionately high and adverse impacts on the Japanese American community and Indian Tribes.”
For over three years, we feel that Japanese American voices were marginalized and not given equal consideration to LS Power, a New York private equity company which is seeking the permit. While BLM met with members of our community, we were disappointed that recommendations to designate the Minidoka Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) and establish a landscape scale Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) have not been adopted. We were disappointed that BLM did not adopt exclusion zones to protect World War II incarceration sites in its final solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) and has not updated its Southern Idaho conflict map to depict Minidoka’s cultural landscape as a high conflict zone. This opposition to preserving sacred land is compounded by BLM’s failure to comply with Section 110 of the National Historic Preservation Act and update its 40 year-old Monument land use plan and visual models.
While BLM hired consultants to meet with the Japanese American community since the issuance of the FEIS, the community has had little meaningful, substantive, two-way conversations directly with BLM leadership regarding the FEIS, Section 106 Programmatic Agreement, protective measures and proposed compensatory mitigation framework. For over three years, BLM has not followed Administration policy to engage with environmental justice communities early in the planning process and its own compensatory mitigation policy to “employ effective, early, and frequent communication about the identification, analysis, and implementation of mitigation with … stakeholders, including the public.”
With the release of BLM’s Mitigation Framework at the end of the NEPA process, the Japanese American community, a dispersed environmental justice community, is now expected to negotiate compensatory mitigation measures, with little knowledge of complex economic models to develop an economic value for the wind project’s impacts on the park and psychological impacts on the Japanese American community.
We call on the Administration to follow its Day One racial and environmental justice policies by adopting the No Action alternative in the ROD. In the event that the Administration pursues an action that would have irreversible impact on the Minidoka site, we respectfully request an indefinite delay in signing of the Section 106 Programmatic Agreement (PA) and ROD to enable the Japanese American community to engage with the BLM and Advisory Council for Historic Preservation to identify mitigation measures in the PA to reduce the project’s impact and permanently protect the park’s cultural landscape.
We call on the Administration to build a better future by telling the whole story, preserving AANHPI heritage and avoiding the mistakes of the past. If you have any questions or to further discuss our concerns, please contact David Inoue of the JACL at 202-223-1240.
Sincerely,
Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA)
Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community
Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association
Boise Japanese American Citizens League
Center for Asian American Media
Cincinnati Chapter JACL
Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks
Densho
Fred T . Korematsu Institute
Historical Museum at Fort Missoula
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) – National
Japanese American Citizens League Alaska Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Contra Costa Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Dayton Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, DC Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Florin-Sacramento Valley Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Idaho Falls Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, New Mexico Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Philadelphia Chapter
Japanese American Citizens League, Pocatello-Blackfoot
Japanese American Museum of Oregon
Japanese American National Museum
Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi
Laotian American National Alliance
Make Us Visible Delaware
Manzanar Committee
Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee
National Federation of Filipino American Associations
National Japanese American Historical Society, Inc.
National Japanese American Memorial Foundation
Nisei Veterans Committee Foundation
Nisei Veterans Memorial Center – Maui
OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates
Preservation Idaho
Resisters.com
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Stop Lava Ridge
The Camera LLC
Topaz Museum Board
Tule Lake Committee
Twin Falls County Historic Preservation Commission
Wakasa Memorial Committee
50 Objects/Stories: The Japanese American Incarceration
100th Infantry Battalion Veterans Organization