Freedom and Equality: What Does it Mean to Be an American?
The United States has long held a curious and ambivalent relationship with freedom. The American founding fathers learned much about freedom and equality from Native Americans, who lived in truly egalitarian societies, but later confined the original Americans to reservations. The founding ideals of the United States – liberty, equality, and natural rights, came largely from Native America. It was Chief Canasatego, the Onondaga chief of the great Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy, who originally gave the colonists the idea to unite, beseeching them to “Be like the Haudenosaunee, to never fall out with one another,” to be stronger together than apart. Our national motto comes from the Latin E Pluribus Unum (“From the many, one”) but we have never fully lived in accord with that slogan.
The political nation began with a beautiful document, The Declaration of Independence, which declared “All men are created equal,” but the writer of that document, Thomas Jefferson, owned 600 slaves, and by then slavery had already been practiced in the New World for more than 150 years. The young nation had Dutch, English, French, Spanish, German and other influences, and was dependent upon immigration to survive and thrive. Eventually, the whole world started to come to America, including immigrants from Asia, fueled by the West Coast Gold Rush of the mid-19th century. Then, came the backlash from those already here.
In 1882, President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law, the first of many anti-Asian discrimination bills, followed by the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1908, which limited Japanese immigration to the wives, children, and relatives of residents already living within the United States. It was not until 1952 that Japanese Americans could become US citizens, even as women and Native Americans achieved suffrage in 1920 and 1924, respectively.
The most egregious action ever taken by the US government against Japanese Americans occurred during WWII. As many are aware, it was February of 1942 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, followed by subsequent orders that enforced the removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast to “relocation camps”. What is lesser known is that the Department of Justice initiated pickup of 'enemy aliens' of Japanese descent on December 7, 1941, for eventual confinement in 4 government prison sites in New Mexico.
The full consequences and ramifications of this sordid chapter of American history are still not openly discussed in mainstream circles. In New Mexico and elsewhere, our guests today have been educating the general public about what occurred and its relevance to today’s outreach toward liberty and justice for all. We will discuss all this and more, on this edition of Circle for Original Thinking entitled "Freedom and Equality: What Does it Mean to Be an American?"
Nikki Nojima Louis (originally Shirley Sadayo Nojima) is a second-generation (Nisei) Japanese American and childhood survivor of Camp Minidoka, Idaho. Her fourth birthday was on December 7, 1941, the day her father was taken by the FBI in Seattle, Washington, and held in DOJ camps in Lordsburg and Santa Fe from 1942-46.
Nikki grew up in Chicago, performed as a teenage dancer, was active in multicultural theater in the 1980s and 1990s as a writer, performer, and producer of projects on peace-and-justice and women’s themes. In 1985, she wrote her first oral history play, Breaking
the Silence, to benefit the civil liberties trial of Gordon Hirabayashi. It continues to be performed. As a theatre artist, Nikki has received commissions from many sources, including the Smithsonian Museum, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; NW Asian American Theatre, and Seattle Group Theatre, where she served as education director of its National Multicultural Playwrights Festival.
In 2002, at age 65, Nikki entered a Ph.D. program at Florida State University. Graduating at age 70, she traveled west for a three-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute and a teaching job at the University of New Mexico. Since 2014, Nikki has created living history programs on the Japanese American experience for the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). Her readers theater group, JACL Players, often collaborate with project CLOE (Confinement in the Land of Enchantment), which includes a traveling exhibit and community forums on New Mexico’s WWII Japanese American prison camps. Nikki has co-produced an award-winning documentary, Community in Conflict: The Santa Fe Internment Camp Marker, with Bay Area director Claudia Katayanagi.
Victor Masaru Yamada is Current Director of Confinement in Land of Enchantment project, about Japanese Americans confined in internment camps in New Mexico during WWII. Became director of the project during Phase III, setting up traveling exhibits promoting awareness of the history. Involved in giving presentations to international, national, state & local organizations. (Phases I / II planning & installation of historic markers, preparation of outreach publication, and development of website).
His family has 19th century roots in Hiroshima, Japan – His maternal grandparents moved to Seattle area in 1906 and his father moved to Seattle in 1919. His parents became US citizens in 1954. Before then, his parents and siblings (three brothers and a sister) moved from Washington to eastern Oregon as part of government’s ‘voluntary evacuation’ program March 1942. Later in 1942, several of his family members were moved to the Minidoka Internment Camp. One of my uncles joined Army 442nd Unit and fought in European campaigns.