Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project has been awarded a grant of $112,500 in the first-ever cycle of the Japanese American Confinement Sites program, administered by the National Park Service.
From 2009 to 2010, Densho will develop 40 video oral histories that will preserve undocumented stories from confinement sites that held Japanese Americans during World War II. Interviews will be conducted primarily in the western states and in Hawaii. They will be added to the free online Densho Digital Archive.
The grant is one of 19 announced by the National Park Service on July 24, totaling $960,000 to help preserve and interpret many of the historic locations. Most of the sites will be in the western part of U.S., where more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.
Congress established the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program (Public Law 109-441, 16 USC 461) for the preservation and interpretation of U.S. confinement sites. The law authorized up to $38 million for the entire life of the grant program to identify, research, evaluate, interpret, protect, restore, repair, and acquire historic confinement sites in order for present and future generations to learn from these sites. ♦
For more information about the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant, visit www.nps.gov/history/hps/hpg/JACS/index.html.
For more information about Densho’s national interview campaign, or to suggest a potential interviewee, contact Densho at 206-320-0095 or e-mail info@densho.org.