[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 22 (Tuesday, February 6, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H1218-H1222]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BAINBRIDGE ISLAND JAPANESE AMERICAN MONUMENT ACT OF 2007
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the
bill (H.R. 161) to adjust the boundary of the Minidoka Internment
National Monument to include the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial in Bainbridge
Island, Washington, and for other purposes.
The Clerk read as follows:
H.R. 161
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Bainbridge Island Japanese
American Monument Act of 2007''.
SEC. 2. BOUNDARY ADJUSTMENT.
(a) In General.--The boundary of the Minidoka Internment
National Monument, located in the State of Idaho and
established by Presidential Proclamation 7395 of January 17,
2001, is adjusted to include the Nidoto Nai Yoni (``Let it
not happen again'') memorial. That memorial--
(1) commemorates the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge
Island, Washington, who were the first to be forcibly removed
from their homes and relocated to internment camps during
World War II under Executive Order 9066: and
(2) consists of approximately 8 acres of land owned by the
City of Bainbridge Island, Washington, as depicted on the map
titled ``Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial'',
numbered 194/80,003, and dated September, 2006.
(b) Map.--The map referred to in subsection (a) shall be
kept on file and made available for public inspection in the
appropriate offices of the National Parks Service.
SEC. 3. ADMINISTRATION OF MONUMENT.
(a) Administration.--The Secretary of the Interior
(hereinafter in this section referred to as the
``Secretary'') shall administer the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial
as part of Minidoka Internment National Monument in
accordance with--
(1) Presidential Proclamation 7395 of January 17, 2001;
(2) laws and regulations generally applicable to units of
the National Park System, including the Act of August 25,
1916 (popularly known as the ``National Park Service Organic
Act,''; 16 U.S.C. 1 et seq); and
(3) any agreements entered into pursuant to subsection (b).
(b) Agreements.--
(1) For the purposes of defining the role of the National
Park Service in administering the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial
owned by the City of Bainbridge Island, the Secretary is
authorized to enter into agreements with--
(A) the City of Bainbridge Island;
(B) the Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Park and
Recreational District;
(C) the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community
Memorial Committee;
(D) the Bainbridge Island Historical Society;
(E) successor entities to the entities named in
subparagraphs (A) through (D); and
(F) other appropriate individuals or entities, at the
discretion of the Secretary.
(2) In order to implement an agreement provided for in
paragraph (1), the Secretary may--
(A) make grants to the City of Bainbridge Island for
development of an administrative and interpretive facility
for the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial;
(B) enter into a cooperative management agreement with the
City of Bainbridge Island, pursuant to section 3(l) of Public
Law 91-383 (16 U.S.C. 1a-2(l); popularly known as the
``National Park System General Authorities Act''), for the
purpose of providing assistance with operation and
maintenance of the memorial;
(C) make grants to other non-Federal entities for other
infrastructure projects at the memorial, subject to a match
of non-Federal funding equal to the amount of a grant made
pursuant to this paragraph; and
(D) make grants or enter into cooperative agreements with
non-Federal entities to support development of interpretive
media for the memorial.
(c) Administrative and Visitor Use Site.--The Secretary is
authorized to operate and maintain a site in Seattle,
Washington, for administrative and visitor use purposes
associated with Minidoka Internment National Monument, using
to the greatest extent practicable the facilities and other
services of the Seattle unit of the Klondike Gold Rush
National Historical Park.
[[Page H1219]]
(d) Coordination of Interpretive and Educational Materials
and Programs.--The Secretary shall coordinate the development
of interpretive and educational materials and programs for
the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial and the Minidoka Internment
National Monument site in the State of Idaho with the
Manzanar National Historic Site in the State of California.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from
Arizona (Mr. Grijalva) and the gentlewoman from Washington (Mrs.
McMorris Rodgers) each will control 20 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona.
General Leave
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and exclude
extraneous material on the bill under consideration.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Arizona?
There was no objection.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 161,
introduced by my colleague on the Natural Resources Committee, the
gentleman from Washington State, Representative Inslee.
This noteworthy legislation would authorize a memorial to commemorate
the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Island, Washington, who were the
first Americans to be forcibly removed from their homes and relocated
in internment camps during World War II.
The new memorial will serve as an important remembrance of a sad
chapter in American history. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order
providing for the relocation of Japanese Americans living along the
west coast.
On March 30, 1942, the relocation began at the Eagledale Ferry Dock,
with 227 Bainbridge Island residents being forcibly removed to
internment camps away from the coast. Eventually, more than 12,000
Japanese Americans in Washington State and more than 110,000 Japanese
Americans along the west coast were relocated.
Public Law 107-363 directed the Secretary of the Interior to study
the Eagledale Ferry Dock on Bainbridge Island, Washington, to determine
the suitability of designing the site as a unit of the National Parks
System. The study was to include an analysis of the historical events
associated with the dock and the potential for preserving and
interpreting the site.
On May 1, 2006, the Department of Interior transmitted to Congress
the study report. The study recommended designating a memorial site on
Bainbridge Island, and that memorial will be managed as a satellite
site of the Minidoka Internment National Monument, an existing National
Park System unit in Idaho. H.R. 161 would implement the recommendations
contained in the study.
Mr. Speaker, I want to commend and congratulate my colleague, Mr.
Inslee, for his commitment and leadership in this matter. A hearing was
held on a nearly identical measure last Congress, and Representative
Inslee arranged for the Subcommittee on National Parks to receive
moving testimony from an internee whose photograph showing her holding
her infant child has become a searing image of the internment.
I would also note that for most of us the internment of Japanese
Americans was a historical event that we read about in history books,
but for two of our colleagues it was part of their life experience. My
colleagues, Mike Honda and Doris Matsui, spent part of their childhoods
in internment camps. I want to acknowledge their experiences in this
unfortunate episode in history.
Mr. Speaker, we strongly support passage of H.R. 161 and urge its
adoption by the House today.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mrs. McMORRIS RODGERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 161 and
yield myself as much time as I may consume.
This legislation further recognizes a tragic period in our Nation's
history by designating the ``let it not happen again'' Memorial on
Bainbridge Island, Washington, as part of the Minidoka Internment
National Monument in the State of Idaho.
While a hearing was held on this legislation in the 109th Congress,
we are concerned that this bill has not gone through the markup
process, where issues in this bill, such as its inclusion of 8 acres of
land in the State of Washington in a monument over 700 miles away,
could have been discussed.
Additionally, it is critical to point out that the National Park
Service testified that this bill could divert scarce resources that are
needed for existing parks and programs.
That being said, we will not oppose the bill.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend Congressman Jay
Inslee of Washington for bringing forth H.R. 161 and yield to him as
much time as he may consume.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, today, when we pass the Bainbridge Island
Japanese American Monument Act of 2007, we will be making a strong
American statement. That statement will be that the power of fear will
never again be allowed to overcome the promise of liberty. These are
images we should never see again in America; and today, with the
passage of this bill, we will make a strong American statement that
they will not.
On March 30, 1942, the American Army, pursuant to an executive order
by an American President, rounded up 227 Americans living on Bainbridge
Island and marched them down the Eagledale Dock in Eagle Harbor of
Bainbridge Island, Washington, surrounded by American soldiers, some
having bayonets deployed. They were taken away to internment against
their will, without trial and without recognition of their rights as
citizens and their honor to serve America.
And now, today, when we are making the memorial on Bainbridge Island
at the site of this dock, which is now being prepared and is under
construction, we will be making an American statement that this cannot
happen again.
The saying is ``Nidoto Nai Yoni, never let it happen again,'' and by
making this part of our National Parks System, we will be making a
statement that these images will never happen to any generation of any
creed in America.
I want to note some of the people. This is a picture of a young
fellow at that time named Frank Kinamoto. In this picture, Frank had
his little tag. Everyone was given a little tag they had to wear with a
number on it. Frank grew up to be a respected dentist on Bainbridge
Island, and Frank has done personally what this legislation will do
nationally. He has spent many years going around showing a collection
of photographs telling young students why the protection of our civil
liberties is critical and why we should never be overcome by fear
again, and I pay respects to Frank and his efforts.
Another young woman at the time, who testified several months ago,
who has been pivotal in this effort, Fumiko Hayashida, shown with her
daughter here just before she was marched down that pier. Fumiko came
to town, who is 95 years young, who is the oldest internee that we are
aware of, to send Congress a message to make a national statement to
memorialize this.
Now, there are three reasons I think it is important that we pass
this bill.
First, although this was a tragic episode in American history, it was
an episode involving patriotism because, and this is incredible to me,
of the 227 people marched down that pier, 62 of them turned around and
volunteered to serve their nation in World War II, and 62 of these
people served with distinction. These people were the ultimate
patriots. Having been sent to camps by Uncle Sam, to turn around and
fight for the freedoms to which they were not entitled was the ultimate
act of patriotism, and we honor them as an act of patriotism in this
memorial.
Second, it is a memorialization of their neighbors. Many of their
neighbors rallied around them. Many of their neighbors guarded some of
their equipment to wait for them to come home. And Walt Widward, the
publisher of the Bainbridge Island Review, was the only publisher on
the western coast of the United States to editorialize against this
violation of American values. That is something to memorialize.
But, most importantly, Nidoto Nai Yoni, never let it happen again.
And this will be a statement to ourselves,
[[Page H1220]]
to our children, to our grandchildren, that, when we are in fear in
this country, we should never lose that anchor of American civil rights
and civil liberties in respect to what we are as Americans.
We have gone through these days in the last several years. We have
experienced fear that sometimes has infected the discussion here in the
Chamber; and when we go through and deal with our fears today, I think
it is well that we take a lesson from history of 1942 to hew to the
power of liberty, rather than the power of fear.
So I am happy today that we will pass this bill that will make this
part of our National Parks System. I will invite all Americans to come
visit us in Bainbridge Island. We will invite the world to come see
that America is a country that makes mistakes but learns and improves.
And this is a continuation of that American tradition of improving the
American value system. So I am happy today this House will take this
step.
I want to thank the Bainbridge Island community and all of those who
worked on this project. Clarence Moriwaki, who has led the effort on
Bainbridge Island, congratulations. And congratulations to America for
always being an improving country.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, at this point, I would like to yield 6
minutes to my good friend and colleague from Oregon, Congressman Wu.
Mr. WU. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support H.R. 161, to expand the
Minidoka Internment National Monument to include the Nidoto Nai Yoni
Memorial, which commemorates the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge
Island, the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Island, Washington, who
were interned during World War II.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an
executive order which forcibly removed approximately 120,000 Americans
of Japanese ancestry from their homes, their friends, and their
communities. They were incarcerated by this government for their
ancestry. Just over 1 month after the executive order was signed, 227
Bainbridge island men, women, and children were sent to internment
camps. They were the very first Japanese American families in the
United States to be incarcerated.
We in the Pacific Northwest would like to think that we live in a
better part of the country, in a part of the country where things are
the way they ought to be. But sometimes the way we want things to be is
not the way things happen or reality. Because these Japanese Americans
were taken from their homes in the heart of the Puget Sound. They were
sailed to Seattle. They were loaded onto trains for a 3-day journey to
Manzanar, a concentration camp in California's Mojave Desert. These
Americans were the very first Americans to be so detained, and the last
of the detainees were not released until October of 1946, 4\1/2\ years
after the signing of the executive order and over a year after the end
of World War II.
But this chapter of our history did not end there. Upon release from
the internment camps, Japanese Americans could not return to the lives
that they had led before the tragic and misled executive order. I would
like to submit further information about General DeWitt's decisions and
recommendations, and I will do that at a different time, but during the
period of internment, they had lost their homes, their businesses, and
their livelihoods.
By commemorating Japanese Americans who were so detained, we ensure
that this sad episode in our history will never be forgotten and
hopefully not repeated, because we need to learn from the mistakes of
the past.
Thirty years passed before the executive order was formally rescinded
in 1976. In 1988, a Presidential apology was issued internees.
This is not an abstraction. This is not a theoretical debate. The
Military Commissions Act passed by this Congress on September 30, 2006,
potentially puts American citizens at risk of military detention. That
is a plain reading of the Military Commissions Act. It was hotly
debated between the then chairmen of two committees and this Member. It
has been commented upon to a limited extent in the national press.
But I think that a fair reading of the Military Commissions Act would
show you that if a person is just walking down the street and is
detained by military authority for whatever reason, and we are not
talking about aliens in Afghanistan, we are talking about someone
walking down the streets of Portland, Oregon, or in Bainbridge Island.
What could potentially happen to that person?
The better course under the Military Commissions Act is that they are
subject to military justice, a very limited review by a military
tribunal, and the end of that appeal road is the Secretary of Defense.
That is actually the better course.
Now, I have to point out that there are 25 detainees in Guantanamo
who, after 5 years of detention, have not had their first review yet;
and I say that is the better course because the course that is actually
more troubling under the Military Commissions Act is that if there is
not a review, there is no appeal. There is no appeal to a civilian
court. There is no habeas corpus, a doctrine which has served Anglo
American societies well for almost a thousand years.
This memorial, which H.R. 161 helps us remember, is not an
abstraction. It was real suffering for the Japanese Americans, for the
Americans who were incarcerated. But it is also a reminder that, as was
said of the executive order much later, when actions are taken by this
government in an atmosphere of hysteria, great injustices can be
perpetrated; and we need to be careful in our era lest we be put in a
position to issue an apology decades from now.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii passed under
martial law, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended, and the
military police took several hundred suspected spies and
saboteurs of Japanese extraction into custody. But the very
size of the Japanese community in Hawaii (nearly half the
territory's population), and its vital importance to the
islands' economy, foreclosed any thought of wholesale
evacuation. The mainland community, however, was
proportionately much smaller (in California, barely 1 percent
of the population), more economically marginal and socially
isolated, and long buffeted by racist pressures. The mainland
Japanese for the most part kept warily to themselves, many of
them toiling with exemplary efficiency on their family fruit
and vegetable farms. Insular and quiescent, they were also
internally riven by age and legal status. Their elders, the
forty thousand first-generation immigrant Japanese, or Issei,
were generally over the age of fifty and debarred from
citizenship by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a
statutory impediment that perversely exposed them to the
accusation that as non-citizens they were poorly assimilated
into American society. A majority of their children, the
eighty thousand second-generation Nisei, were under the age
of eighteen. Born in the United States, they were also
citizens. Alien and citizen alike, the peculiarly vulnerable
Pacific Coast Japanese community was about to feel the full
wrath of war-fueled hysteria.
Curiously, no clamor for wholesale reprisals against the
mainland Japanese arose in the immediate aftermath of the
Pearl Harbor attack. The Los Angeles Times soberly
editorialized on December 8 that most of the Japanese on the
Coast were ``good Americans, born and educated as such,'' and
serenely foresaw that there would be ``no riots, no mob
law.'' General John L. DeWitt, chief of the army's Western
Defense Command, at first dismissed loose talk of mass
evacuations as ``damned nonsense.'' He condemned any
broadside assaults on the rights of the American-born Nisei.
``An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen,''
he declared. Individual arrests were another matter.
Government surveillance, ongoing since 1935, had identified
some two thousand potentially subversive persons in the
Japanese community. Along with fourteen thousand German and
Italian security risks nationwide, they were quietly rounded
up in the last days of 1941. But those individual detentions
stopped well short of wholesale incarcerations. ``I was
determined,'' Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote, ``to
avoid mass internment, and the persecution of aliens that had
characterized the First World War.''
In fact, the immigrants whose loyalty had been questioned
during World War I had then been freshly arrived and seemed
to many observers unarguably alien. But by 1941 those older
European groups were settled communities, well assimilated,
their patriotism as well as their political loyalty actively
cultivated by Roosevelt's New Deal. Though a surprising six
hundred thousand Italians--more than 10 percent of the entire
Italian-American community--remained Italian citizens and
were automatically labeled ``enemy aliens'' after Mussolini's
declaration of war, Roosevelt instructed Biddle to cancel
that designation in a joyfully received announcement at
Carnegie Hall, shrewdly delivered on Columbus Day 1942, just
weeks before the congressional elections.
The Japanese were not so fortunate. As war rumors took wing
in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, sobriety gave way to
anxiety,
[[Page H1221]]
then to a rising cry for draconian action against the
Japanese on the West Coast. Inflammatory and invariably false
reports of Japanese attacks on the American mainland flashed
through coastal communities. Eleanor Roosevelt's airplane, en
route to Los Angeles on the evening of the Pearl Harbor
attack, was grounded in the Midwest while the first lady
telephoned Washington to check a radio message that San
Francisco was under bombardment. Painters at Stanford
University blacked out the skylight of the library's main
reading room so that it could not serve as a beacon to enemy
pilots. Carpenters hammered up dummy aircraft plants in Los
Angeles to decoy Japanese bombers away from the real
factories. Athletic officials moved the traditional New
Year's Day football classic from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena,
California; the game was played instead in North Carolina,
presumably safe from Japanese attack. Japan's astonishing
string of victories in the Pacific further unsettled American
public opinion. Hong Kong fell on December 2, Manila on
January 2, Singapore on January 25.
The release at the end of January of a government
investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack proved the decisive
blow. The report, prepared by Supreme Court Justice Owen J.
Roberts, alleged without documentation that Hawaii-based
espionage agents, including Japanese-American citizens, had
abetted Nagumo's strike force. Two days later, DeWitt
reported ``a tremendous volume of public opinion now
developing against the Japanese of all classes, that is
aliens and non-aliens.'' DeWitt himself, described by Biddle
as having a ``tendency to reflect the views of the last man
to whom he talked,'' soon succumbed to Rumor's siren. He
wildly declared to an incredulous Justice Department official
that every ship sailing out of the Columbia had been attacked
by submarines guided by clandestine radio operators near the
river's mouth. When evidence of actual attacks failed to
materialize, DeWitt invoked the tortured logic that the very
absence of any sabotage activity on the West Coast proved the
existence of an organized, disciplined conspiracy in the
Japanese community, cunningly withholding its blow until it
could be struck with lethal effect. In February the respected
columnist Walter Lippmann alleged that military authorities
had evidence of radio communications between ``the enemy at
sea and enemy agents on land''--a charge that FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover had already advised Biddle was utterly without
foundation. A radio technician from the Federal
Communications Commission reviewed DeWitt's ``evidence'' of
electronic signals and declared it hogwash. All 760 of
DeWitt's suspicious radio transmissions could be accounted
for, and not one involved espionage. ``Frankly,'' the
technician concluded, ``I have never seen an organization
[the U.S. Army's Western Defense Command] that was so
hopeless to cope with radio intelligence requirements. The
personnel is unskilled and untrained. Most are privates who
can read only ten words a minute. . . . It's pathetic to say
the least.''
But by this time facts were no protection against the
building gale of fear and prejudice. ``Nobody's
constitutional rights,'' Lippmann magisterially intoned,
``include the right to reside and do business on a
battlefield.'' Lippmann's colleague Westbrook Pegler echoed
him less elegantly a few days later: ``The Japanese in
California should be under armed guard to the last man and
woman right now,'' Pegler wrote in his widely read column,
``and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.''
Unapologetically racist voices also joined the chorus.
``We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for
selfish reasons,'' a leader of California's Grower-Shipper
Vegetable Association declared. ``We might as well be honest.
We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the
Pacific Coast or the brown man.'' Prodded by such sentiments,
in early February 1942 DeWitt officially requested
authority to remove all Japanese from the West Coast. It
was impossible he claimed, to distinguish the loyal from
the disloyal in the peculiarly alien and inscrutable
Japanese community. The only remedy was wholesale
evacuation. The same man who had said a month earlier,
``An American citizen, after all, is an American
citizen,'' now announced, ``A Jap's a Jap. . . . It makes
no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. .
. . I don't want any of them.''
At the Justice Department several officials, including
conspicuously Edward J. Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy
Control Unit, as well as Biddle's assistant James H. Rowe,
struggled to quell this irrationally mounting fury. Rowe
denounced Lippmann and Pegler as ``Armchair Strategists and
Junior G-Men'' whose reckless charges came ``close to
shouting FIRE! in the theater; and if race riots occur, these
writers will bear a heavy responsibility.'' Attorney General
Biddle informed Secretary of War Stimson ``that the
Department of Justice would not under any circumstances
evacuate American citizens.'' But at a fateful meeting in the
living room of the attorney general's Washington home on the
evening of February 17, the gentle and scholarly Biddle
buckled. Facing off against Assistant Secretary of War John
J. McCloy and two army officers, Ennis and Rowe argued
heatedly that DeWitt's request for evacuation orders should
be denied. Unknown to his two subordinates, however, Biddle,
new to the cabinet, unsure of his standing with Roosevelt,
and overawed by the Olympian figure of Stimson, had told the
secretary of war by telephone earlier in the day that he
would not oppose DeWitt's recommendation. When this became
clear, Rowe remembered, ``I was so mad that I could not
speak. . . . Ennis almost wept.'' Even Stimson had grave
misgivings. ``The second generation Japanese can only be
evacuated,'' he wrote in his diary, ``either as part of a
total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits,
or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their
racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or
even trust the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but
I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our
constitutional system to apply it.'' Despite his own
reservations and the sputtering opposition of the Justice
Department officials, Stimson advised the president that
DeWitt should be authorized to proceed. The cabinet devoted
only a desultory discussion to the matter. On February 19
Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It directed the War
Department to ``prescribe military areas . . . from which any
and all persons may be excluded.'' No explicit reference to
the Japanese was necessary. When Biddle feebly objected that
the order was ``ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily
cruel,'' Roosevelt silenced him with the rejoinder: ``[T]his
must be a military decision.''
Ms. BORDALLO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 16,
the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Monument Act of 2007. This
important legislation will expand the boundaries of the federally-
recognized Minidoka Internment National Monument to include the Nidoto
Nai Yoni `Let It Not Happen Again' Memorial in Bainbridge Island,
Washington.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that
authorized the forcible removal and relocation of Americans of Japanese
ancestry from the western United States nearly 3 months after the
Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated the United
States' entrance into World War II. Under the authority of Executive
Order 9066, on March 24, 1942, Lieutenant General John DeWitt issued
Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1, forcing the removal of the 227 Japanese
Americans residing on Bainbridge Island.
This edict allowed Japanese Americans residing on Bainbridge Island
only 6 days to sell their belongings, close their businesses, and pack
up their lives before resettlement and internment in camps elsewhere in
the United States. These Americans endured the additional burden and
injustice of being congregated at Eagledale Ferry Dock under armed
guard before transport to the mainland. Friends and neighbors converged
as a symbolic gesture of unity and support for these Japanese Americans
who were involuntarily removed from the community. They left behind all
the belongings and possessions that they could not carry or wear. These
Americans of Japanese ancestry were the first of over 100,000 Japanese
Americans to be interned in remote and desolate camps. They were the
first group of Japanese Americans to be stripped of their rights as
American citizens under the authorities of Executive Order 9066.
Today, by authorizing this historical piece of land to be within the
boundaries of the Minidoka Internment National Monument, we memorialize
the sacrifices Japanese Americans made during World War II. We also
would acknowledge through the enactment of this legislation the
occurrence of an egregious infringement of American citizenship rights.
By adopting this legislation we would provide an official record of our
hope and determination that an act similar to this one is never
repeated in the future. This site marks the beginning of the forced
exodus of an entire ethnic minority from the western United States and
today we hope to transform it into a means of educating future
generations of the importance of civil liberties, especially in times
of war.
This memorial, a short ferry boat ride from Seattle, is a fitting
symbol of this disturbing and unfortunate chapter in American history.
While the internment camps themselves are located in desolate areas,
far away from everyday sight and thought, this monument, in the heart
of the Pacific Northwest, will serve as a continual reminder of the
patriotism of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and the
mistakes that we should never let happen again. I urge my colleagues to
join me in supporting this important legislation and I commend our
colleague, the gentleman from Washington, Mr. Inslee, for his
sponsorship of this bill.
Mrs. McMORRIS RODGERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my
time.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva) that the House suspend the rules
and pass the bill, H.R. 161.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. In the opinion of the Chair, two-thirds
being in the affirmative, the ayes have it.
Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
[[Page H1222]]
The yeas and nays were ordered.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX and the
Chair's prior announcement, further proceedings on this question will
be postponed.
____________________