About the Speaker:
Aura Sunada Newlin is a fourth-generation Wyomingite, fourth-generation Japanese American, and Executive Director for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Her heritage involves intertwined stories of imprisonment at Heart Mountain and Tule Lake; segregated military service; and hardships suffered by railroaders who were fired because of their Japanese ancestry. Aura earned her PhD and MA in anthropology from Case Western Reserve University, and her Bachelor’s Degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Wyoming. Her work has been profiled by the Women in Wyoming podcast and gallery exhibit; the University of Wyoming’s Featured Alumni series; Wyoming PBS, and more.
Program Description:
Between 1942 and 1945, some 14,000 people of Japanese ancestry were unjustly incarcerated at the Heart Mountain “Relocation Center” between Cody and Powell, Wyoming. The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is now custodian of the few remnants of the camp’s infrastructure: a restored barrack, a massive root cellar, the skeletons of old hospital wards, and a smokestack that sits like a beacon in the now sparsely populated landscape, alerting passersby that something important happened here. Amidst these surviving structures that comprise the Heart Mountain “campus,” the Foundation has built a nationally-acclaimed museum and a brand new retreat center, the Mineta-Simpson Institute (MSI). Now a Smithsonian Affiliate, the site is emerging as a hub for cross-community discussions about democracy, heritage, civil discourse, and the rule of law.
In this presentation, Executive Director Aura Sunada Newlin will discuss how the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is drawing on physical and cultural landscapes to bring together three distinct communities that have called this place home: Japanese Americans, the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, and Homesteaders. Through historic preservation, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is converting what was once a place of rupture into a place of connection.
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