A mere 17 miles east of Lamar is a site that, were it not for the brown wooden sign reading “Amache Japanese-American Relocation Center”, could easily remain unnoticed to anyone passing by. The sign, at the intersection of County Rd. 23.5 and Highway 50, points to one of our nation’s darkest pockets of history. Growing up in Lamar, I can’t recall ever being taught in school about Camp Amache, which is basically in Lamar’s “back yard”, nor about Executive Order 9066 which, when signed by then-President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed to be a threat to national security. The bombing of Pearl Harbor caused a spike in anti-Japanese sentiment, particularly towards those living along the West coast of California, whom the government feared could pose a threat to the country. These Japanese-Americans, the majority of which were U.S. citizens, were sent to “relocation centers”. These centers have also been referred to as internment, incarceration, concentration, or detention camps, which are more appropriate names given the barbed-wire fences surrounding them and the armed guard towers which overlooked them. Over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in 10 of these camps spread across the U.S. In addition to Amache, there were camps in California (Tule Lake and Manzanar Camps), Utah (Topaz Camp), Wyoming (Heart Mountain Camp), Arizona (Gila River and Poston Camps), Idaho (Minidoka Camp), and Arkansas (Rowher and Jerome Camps). Amache was the smallest of the ten.
