/ Updated 
 
 On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the World War II incarcerations of Japanese Americans. Over the next five years, more than 120,000 people, two-thirds of whom were native-born United States citizens, were forced to leave their homes and livelihoods for quickly-built camps in some of the country's most unforgiving climates. 
 
 During the intervening years, Japanese Americans fought bravely in the United States military, with the Army's 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up of second-generation nisei soldiers, being the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. Japanese Americans have also fought for justice at home, winning redress and an apology from Congress in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. 
 
 "[Congress] recognizes that a grave injustice was done to both citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry," the law reads. "On behalf of the Nation, the Congress apologizes." 
 
 RELATED: Remembering Executive Order 9066, the ‘Single Act’ that Began Internment 
 
 A rosary and a stone sit on a monument honoring the dead in the cemetery at Manzanar National Historic Site on December 9, 2015 near Independence, California. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images 
 
 Seventy-five years later, the lessons from this period in time continue to resonate with many. Below are some of the stories of survivors of incarceration and the advocates that are keeping their histories alive that NBC Asian America has reported. 
 
 Behind Barbed Wire: Remembering America’s Largest Internment Camp 
 
 Last year, NBC Asian America spoke with five Americans who recounted the years of their lives spent behind the barbed wire of the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp for those labeled as "disloyal" to the government. 
 
 From left to right: Satsuki Ina (photographed in her home in Sacramento, California); Hiroshi Kashiwagi (photographed in his home in San Francisco, California); Jim Tanimoto (photographed at his home in Gridley, California); George Nakano (photographed in his home in Torrance, California); and Jimi Yamaichi (photographed at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose in San Jose, California). All five, photographed in 2016, were interned at Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. Michael Chin / NBC News 
 
 Through audio, photos, and text, Satsuki Ina, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Jim Tanimoto, George Nakano, and Jimi Yamaichi described what it was like to wake up one day and have their entire lives changed. The five also share their first impressions of Tule Lake, the ways in which their community fought back, and how — years later — they continue to find healing through collective memory. 
 
 Seventy Years After Manzanar, the Stories of Incarceration Live On 
 
 Three survivors of Manzanar, the most widely-known of the 10 camps, spoke with NBC Asian America about their experiences during the war, and how they learned to tell their stories. 
 
 "We never talked about it, or if we did it was just joking," Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, author of "Farewell to Manzanar," told NBC. "I was married 13 or 14 years before my husband knew [about Manzanar]. Somehow he asked me about it. I began to tell him and I became hysterical. It was shameful for three years to be living in this prison camp." 
 
 The Parallel Between Trump’s Immigration Ban and Past U.S. Anti-Asian Policies 
 
 "In particular, this climate of fear and racism and hatred that is going on parallels a lot with what we saw happen during World War II." 
 
 A Lookback at the Decades-Long Embargoed Incarceration Camp Photos 
 
 The federal government, reportedly from seeing these photographs as potentially damaging press, embargoed them for 30 years. 
 
 75 Years After Start of Internment, Archaeologists Excavate Hawaii’s Largest Camp 
 
 "When I was in elementary school I never even heard that this had occurred. We never studied this in history or talked about it," William Belcher, an archaeology professor at the University of Hawaiʻi - West Oʻahu, told NBC Asian America. 
 
 Four decades out of elementary school, that's changed. 
 
 From Internment to Advocacy, One Family’s Journey 
 
 "Here, my family lived behind barbed wire. Here, they fought to stay together. And here, their lives – like hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans at the time – were forever changed." 
 
 Digital Project Aims to Preserve Stories of Incarcerated Japanese Americans 
 
 "I do think sometimes it's an uphill battle because most Americans view Asians as model minority and that's used against other groups. I think we have to somehow break through and show it in a clear light. We have to show that we're all struggling. It's not just one versus the other. We all have to make things better." 
 
 Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. ||||| / Updated By Mathew Ursua 
 
 Chopping through the overgrowth with machetes to clear a way through terrain, William Belcher’s students know there’s American history beneath dirt that’s settled for seven decades. 
 
 The land is stained. 
 
 "When I was in elementary school I never even heard that this had occurred. We never studied this in history or talked about it,” Belcher, an archaeology professor at the University of Hawaiʻi - West Oʻahu, told NBC News. 
 
 Four decades out of elementary school, that’s changed. 
 
 Belcher, now in his 50s, does archaeological work on the site of the Honouliuli National Monument, the site of an incarceration camp where some of Hawaii’s Japanese-American residents were held during World War II. 
 
 Seventy-five years after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 and set in motion the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, Belcher’s archaeology students have been cutting through grass and bushes, getting dirt on their hands, and laboring atop soil that veils history where Hawaii’s largest incarceration camp stood. 
 
 Their work at the site, which was designated a national monument by then-President Barack Obama in 2015, is part of an effort to preserve it and map its features. 
 
 “It’s interesting to watch the students all of a sudden get a personal connection to this piece of land. It’s just part of the landscape of UH-West Oʻahu — just up the hill from the campus,” Belcher said. 
 
 For now, the field school students are among the few who can set foot there. Rebecca Rinas, a planner for National Park Service, told NBC News it could be many years before Honouliuli is open to visitors. Funding isn’t guaranteed and the two-year-old national monument is still landlocked by private land. 
 
 There are no public roads in or out of the site, Rinas said of the gulch in central Oahu that receives little airflow. Those conditions, Belcher noted, have made working on the site a challenge. 
 
 “The gulch gets to about 90 degrees — in excess of 90 degrees most of the time when we were there,” Belcher said. “The basic technology is to walk in a systematic fashion across the entire landscape.” 
 
 But the grass gets in the way. 
 
 The grass at the Honouliuli site is "very thick and very heavy and you're trying to see what's on the ground. Your visibility is very low. It's very difficult to do," William Belcher said, adding that the group spends a lot of time clearing the area with machetes. Courtesy of University of Hawai'i - West O'ahu 
 
 “It's very thick and very heavy and you’re trying to see what’s on the ground. Your visibility is very low. It’s very difficult to do,” he said, adding that the group spends a lot of time clearing the area with machetes. 
 
 Belcher said students also mapped roads, fence lines, concrete structures, and rocks with handheld GPS units. 
 
 “It’s interesting to watch the students all of a sudden get a personal connection to this piece of land. It’s just part of the landscape of UH-West Oʻahu — just up the hill from the campus." 
 
 Buried in the dirt are concrete slabs, one of which stands a meter below the surface. Belcher, who’s led about a dozen students over the last two summers into the gulch, said the slabs were foundations for buildings. 
 
 UH-West Oʻahu anthropology student Tracy Dixon was one of the 16 who worked the site over the past summer for credit. He said the group started excavating to look for a slab which was believed to be where a mess hall stood. 
 
 “Everybody who worked and was in that field school had a great time, bonded doing the hard work, and had an amazing experience,” Dixon told NBC News. He said that the group did locate a corner of the slab they were looking for after digging deep. 
 
 Of the more than dozen sites designated as incarceration camps and detention facilities in the U.S., Honouliuli was built for “prolonged detention.” It detained local Japanese leaders and businessmen, clergymen, and those with influence. (In addition to serving as an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans, several thousand prisoners of war, including Italians and Koreans, were also detained — even after the war ended.) 
 
 RELATED: The Untold Story: Japanese-Americans' WWII Internment in Hawaii 
 
 According to Belcher, unlike on the West Coast, territorial Hawaii’s Japanese weren’t kept in total exclusion. Forty percent of Hawaii was Japanese. Many were immigrants who crossed the Pacific Ocean on ships to work on plantations. 
 
 “Hawaii had a plantation economy that would’ve collapsed. It was dependent on the Japanese culture,” Belcher said. “They only interred a small percentage of the people on the island.” 
 
 In fact, before it became the site of Hawaii’s longest-operating incarceration camp, Honouliuli was plantation land. 
 
 “With that came a lot of importation of labor which increased the ethnic diversity and changed the landscape into intense agriculture,” Belcher said. 
 
 Reaching further back in time, archaeologists can examine ancient Hawaiian sustainability. Belcher said he’s interested in the gulch’s place in the ahupua‘a system. After the buildings were demolished in 1946, the site was used for ranching. Belcher explained that digs have uncovered horse bones from the 1950s through mid-2000s. 
 
 Along with connecting the dots of the site’s past, Belcher also said that he sees parallels in the Honouliuli site to today’s post-9/11 policies. 
 
 “Many saw that as an erosion of constitutional rights,” Belcher said. “Taking the other and picking that person as the enemy even if they’re productive American citizens.” 
 
 For Dixon, the student who worked the site over the summer, the monument is about an important time in American history. He said he plans to enroll again next summer. 
 
 “It was a very worthwhile project,” he said. 
 
 Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. ||||| On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, introduced this resolution in the Second Continental Congress proposing independence for the American colonies. 
 
 Acting under the instruction of the Virginia Convention, Richard Henry Lee on June 7, 1776, introduced a resolution in the Second Continental Congress proposing independence for the colonies. The Lee Resolution contained three parts: a declaration of independence, a call to form foreign alliances, and "a plan for confederation." The document that is included on page 22 is the complete resolution in Richard Henry Lee's handwriting. 
 
 On June 11, 1776, the Congress appointed three concurrent committees in response to the Lee Resolution: one to draft a declaration of independence, a second to draw up a plan "for forming foreign alliances," and a third to "prepare and digest the form of a confederation." 
 
 Because many members of the Congress believed action such as Lee proposed to be premature or wanted instructions from their colonies before voting, approval was deferred until July 2. On that date, Congress adopted the first part (the declaration). The affirmative votes of 12 colonies are listed at the right. New York cast no vote until the newly elected New York Convention upheld the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776. 
 
 The plan for making treaties was not approved until September of 1776; the plan of confederation was delayed until November of 1777. 
 
 (Information excerpted from National Archives Education Staff. The Constitution: Evolution of a Government. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2001.) ||||| Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.[1] 
 
 Early life [ edit ] 
 
 Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born on May 26, 1895, at 1041 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, New Jersey[2][3] to second-generation German immigrants Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange.[4] She had a younger brother, Martin.[4] She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old, one of two traumatic incidents early in her life.[5] The other was her contraction of polio at age seven, which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp.[2][3] "It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."[6] 
 
 Career [ edit ] 
 
 Lange graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls[7] and although she had never operated or owned a camera, she was adamant that she would become a photographer upon graduating high school.[8] Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City, in a class taught by Clarence H. White.[8] She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe.[5] In 1918, she left New York with a female friend to travel the world, but was forced to end the trip in San Francisco due to a robbery and settled there, working as a photo finisher at a photographic supply shop.[9] While working at this shop, Lange became acquainted with other photographers and met an investor that aided in the establishment of a successful portrait studio.[3][5][10] This business supported Lange and her family for the next 15 years.[5] In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons, Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1930.[11] 
 
 Lange's early studio work mostly involved shooting portrait photographs of the social elite in San Francisco.[12] However, with the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her photos during this period were reflected in much of John Steinbeck’s writing in The Grapes of Wrath.[13] Her studies of unemployed and homeless people, starting with White Angel Breadline (1933) which depicted a lone man facing away from the crowd in front of a soup kitchen run by a widow known as the White Angel,[14] captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). 
 
 Resettlement Administration [ edit ] 
 
 Migrant Mother Lange's iconic 1936 photograph, 
 
 "Broke, baby sick, and car trouble!" (1937) (1937) 
 
 In December 1935, she and Dixon divorced and she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.[11] For the next five years they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers – Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos. She lived in Berkeley for the rest of her life. 
 
 Working for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, they brought the plight of the poor and forgotten – particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers – to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era. 
 
 One of Lange's most recognized works is titled Migrant Mother.[15] The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph: 
 
 I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.[16] 
 
 After Lange returned home, she told the editor of a San Francisco newspaper about conditions at the camp and provided him with two of her photos. The editor informed federal authorities and published an article that included the photos. As a result, the government rushed aid to the camp to prevent starvation.[17] 
 
 According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.[18] Twenty-two of the photographs she took as part of the FSA were included in John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies when it was originally published in The San Francisco News in 1936. 
 
 Japanese American internment [ edit ] 
 
 Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans 
 
 Grandfather and grandson at Manzanar Relocation Center 
 
 In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for achievement in photography.[19] After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA).[20] She covered the internment of Japanese Americans[21] and their subsequent incarceration, traveling throughout urban and rural California to photograph families preparing to leave, visiting several temporary assembly centers as they opened, and eventually highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. Much of her work focused on the waiting and uncertainty involved in the removal: piles of luggage waiting to be sorted, families wearing identification tags and waiting for transport.[22] To many observers, her photograph[23] of Japanese American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to camp is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime.[24] 
 
 Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded most of them, and they were not seen publicly during the war.[25][26] Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. 
 
 California School of Fine Arts/San Francisco Art Institute [ edit ] 
 
 In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now known as San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well.[27] 
 
 In 1952, she co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. The magazine did not run the piece, so Lange devoted one whole issue of Aperture to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.[28] Another series for Life magazine which she began in 1954 featured Martin Pulich, a lawyer, due to her interest in how poor people were defended in the court system which by one account grew out of her experience with her brother’s arrest and trial.[29] 
 
 Death and legacy [ edit ] 
 
 In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor.[4] She suffered from gastric problems as well as post-polio syndrome – although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians.[5] 
 
 Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70.[11][30] She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren,[31] and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Three months later, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a retrospective show of her work, which Lange herself had helped to curate.[32] 
 
 In 2003 Lange was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[33] In 2006 an elementary school was named in her honor in Nipomo, California, near the site where she photographed Migrant Mother.[34] In 2008 she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. Her son Daniel Dixon accepted the honor in her place.[35] In October, 2018, Her hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey, honored her with a mural dipicting her and two other prominent women of history from Hoboken.[36] 
 
 See also [ edit ] 
 
 References [ edit ] 
 
 Further reading [ edit ] 
 
 Dorothea Lange; Paul Schuster Taylor (1999) [1939]. An American Exodus: A record of Human Erosion . Jean Michel Place. ISBN 978-2-85893-513-0. 
 
 Milton Meltzer (1978). Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life . Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-0622-2. 
 
 Linda Gordon (2009). Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits . W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-05730-0. 
 
 Linda Gordon; Gary Y. Okihiro, eds. (2006). Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment . New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-33090-7. 
 
 Linda Gordon (2003). Encyclopedia of the Great Depression . Gale. ISBN 9780028656861. 
 
 Anne Whiston Spirn (2008). Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field . University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226769844. 
 
 Sam Stourdze, ed. (2005). Dorothea Lange: The Human Face . Paris: NBC Editions. ISBN 9782913986015. 
 
 Neil Scott-Petrie (2014). Dorothea Lange Color: Photography . CreateSpace. ISBN 9781495477157. 
 
 Pardo, Alona (2018). Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing. Prestel. ISBN 9783791357768. ||||| / Updated By Stephany Bai 
 
 Densho, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of Japanese-American incarceration during WWII, recently highlighted the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, whose photographs were placed under government embargo for thirty years. 
 
 Natasha Varner, Densho’s communications manager, emphasized the importance of Lange’s work in an organization blog post. “Lange’s exclusion-era photographs helped catalyze Japanese-American activism in the 1970s, and they continue to powerfully shape the collective memory of one of the darkest moments in American history,” she wrote. 
 
 Lange, known primarily for her photographs of Dust Bowl America during the Great Depression, was hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in 1942 to document the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans. 
 
 Original WRA caption: Turlock, California. These children have just arrived at Turlock Assembly center. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be transferred later to a War Relocation Authority center for the duration. Dorothea Lange / Densho, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration 
 
 Lange had personal misgivings about the work, according to Densho: She told a friend that she was “appalled” by a “federal government who could treat its citizens so unjustly.” The organization said she was also frustrated by the WRA’s censorship, which explicitly banned Lange from photographing barbed wire and bayonets. She quit after just a few months, but not before producing “a body of work that at once captured the inhumane actions of the US government and the humanity of the individuals being forced to leave their lives behind for the 'crime' of Japanese ancestry.” 
 
 RELATED: Digital Project Aims to Preserve Stories of Incarcerated Japanese Americans 
 
 The federal government, seeing these photographs as potentially damaging press, embargoed them for 30 years, according to Densho. They were released for public viewing in 1972, when they were featured in the landmark traveling exhibition, Executive Order 9066. 
 
 April 25, 1942, Byron, California. Original caption: Toshi Mizoguchi waiting at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station to register for evacuation. Mr. Mizoguchi came to the United States from Japan in 1892 and has been a farm laborer on California ranches since that time. He is unmarried. He is seen wearing an American flag on a celluloid button. Dorothea Lange / Densho, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration 
 
 Brian Niiya, Densho’s content director, told NBC News in an e-mail that the exhibit, and the release of the Lange photographs, was timely. 
 
 “The exhibition came in the context of increasing sympathetic media coverage of the Japanese American WWII story,” he said. “At the same time, there was also increasing interest within the Japanese American community, largely driven by Sansei coming of age and influenced by the 1960s-1970s social movements.” 
 
 “There is [an] oft-told story about Sansei [third-generation Japanese-American] kids first learning about the incarceration in school and confronting their parents about why they never told their kids about this," he continued. "(The most famous such story is that of Karen Korematsu, who learned about her father's landmark Supreme Court case in school!)” 
 
 Niiya wrote that exhibitions of photographs such as Lange’s, which had never been seen to the public before, helped catalyze political movements within the Japanese-American community. 
 
 “Along with camp pilgrimages, political activism around the repeal of Title II, and a flood of new books, these exhibitions were part of the changing attitudes to the Japanese American wartime experience in the early 1970s that led to the Redress Movement of the 1980s,” he wrote. 
 
 May 20, 1942. Woodland, California. Original caption: Evacuees of Japanese ancestry from this rich agricultural district are on their way to Merced Assembly center. This special train consists of ten cars. Dorothea Lange / Densho, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration 
 
 Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. ||||| That was another time, and another Times. This newspaper has long since reversed itself on the subject. Not only was some of our reasoning explicitly racist, but in our desperate attempts to sound rational — by supposedly balancing the twin imperatives of security and liberty in the midst of World War II — we exaggerated the severity of the threat while failing to acknowledge the significance of revoking the most fundamental rights of American citizens based solely on their ancestry. In the 1980s, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found there had been no military justification for the exclusion and noted that no Japanese Americans had been convicted of spying or sabotage. The incarceration was a "grave injustice," the congressional commission concluded. ||||| Farming Behind Barbed Wire: Japanese-Americans Remember WWII Incarceration 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project via The National Archives Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project via The National Archives 
 
 At 98, Riichi Fuwa doesn't remember his Social Security number, but he remembers this: "19949. That was my number the government gave me," he said. "19949. You were more number than name." 
 
 That was the number that Fuwa was assigned when he was 24 years old, soon after he was forced off his family's farm in Bellingham, Wash., and incarcerated at the Tule Lake camp, just south of the Oregon border in California's Modoc County. 
 
 Seventy-five years ago today, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be forced from their homes and businesses during World War II. 
 
 Fuwa was one of almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most American citizens and farmers, who were incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation" or "internment" camps. I met Fuwa last summer, when I joined a four-day pilgrimage to Tule Lake undertaken by survivors of the camps and their children and grandchildren. 
 
 "I wanted to see the place for the last time," Fuwa told me. 
 
 Before the war, nearly two-thirds of West Coast Japanese-Americans worked in agriculture. People like 93-year-old Jim Tanimoto, from the Sacramento Valley town of Gridley. His father grew rice, then cultivated peaches. 
 
 Tanimoto and Fuwa's immigrant parents faced laws barring them from owning or holding long-term leases on land. Despite that, by 1940 they and their American-born children grew almost 40 percent of the vegetables in California. 
 
 toggle caption Courtesy of Gen Fujitani 
 
 Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor. Resentment and hysteria grew about anyone of Japanese origin, even those born in the United States. Tanimoto remembered, "Then Executive Order 9066 was signed. Things changed." 
 
 On Feb. 19, 1942, when President Roosevelt signed the executive order authorizing the removal of anyone from military areas, Japanese-Americans could read between the lines. They knew the order mainly targeted them. Soon, the commanding general for the West Coast determined that all people of Japanese origin – whether immigrant or U.S.-born citizen – in coastal areas had to move inland onto so-called "relocation camps." Many had to abandon their orchards and fields, with crops ready to harvest. 
 
 "When I stepped out of the train, the terrain was not a big shock," Tanimoto said. "I knew what the terrain looked like." 
 
 That's because, when he was younger, Tanimoto had hunted for deer up in the Tule Lake Basin, when all he could see was dusty land and scrub brush. When, in 1942, Tanimoto and the 15,000 other forcibly evacuated Japanese-Americans arrived at Tule Lake, they saw a landscape dominated by barracks covered in black tar paper. 
 
 "Rows and rows and rows of these buildings," said Tanimoto. "We were inside the barbed-wire fence, the armed guard towers. We couldn't walk out of the enclosure. I might get shot." He remembered thinking, "Hey, I'm an American citizen! Now I'm the one being hunted." 
 
 Government Farmworkers 
 
 Jim Tanimoto and many other once-successful farm owners were about to become field workers for the U.S. government. 
 
 The guard towers and rows of barracks have long since been torn down or moved. Our guide on the pilgrimage points out the few remaining buildings, and the huge swaths of farmland once worked by Tule Lake prisoners. Over 1,000 Japanese-Americans worked in the fields, most earning just $12 a month, a quarter of what farmworkers made at the time. 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Densho: The Japanese American Legacy via The National Archives Densho: The Japanese American Legacy via The National Archives 
 
 Agriculture wasn't incidental at any of the incarceration camps. Many of the new War Relocation Authority administrators came right from the Department of Agriculture. Camp locations, though usually in deserts and other inhospitable places, were often chosen for their existing government irrigation projects or agricultural potential. The government's intention was to improve the land for after the war. 
 
 Each of the 10 incarceration camps nationwide had working farms, but Tule Lake was different. The land was on a former lake bed, so despite a dusty, snowy and windy climate and a short growing season, it produced enough food for its own mess halls and those at other camps. That production was so essential that when the Tule Lake camp opened, eligible men who refused to work were threatened with $20 a month fines. 
 
 Farmworkers at Tule Lake harvested almost 30 crops, including potatoes, rutabagas and daikon radishes. They also grew grain and hay for animal feed, and kept hogs and chickens. 
 
 Before the war, Lucille Hitomi's father ran a commercial flower business in Mountain View, Calif. At Tule Lake, he worked the fields, under white supervisors. 
 
 "I remember my dad saying, 'I don't know if they were good farmers,' " she said, but those bosses relied on the expertise of the Japanese-American laborers to develop a productive farm. To keep some semblance of normalcy, families like Hitomi's tried to create special meals. It helped that her brother worked at the camp slaughterhouse. 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption National Archives National Archives 
 
 "I don't know if this was legal," Hitomi remembered, "but sometimes he would bring bits of meat home. My mother brought to camp a hot plate and a frying pan, and she'd cook the meat in the barrack," instead of joining hundreds of others in the mess hall. "I guess it was more like home," Hitomi said. 
 
 The stated purpose of these farms was to feed the incarcerated, but camp administrators took produce, grain and hay grown by these imprisoned Japanese American workers, and sold it on the open market – over 2 million pounds of it from Tule Lake alone. 
 
 Loyalty questioned 
 
 One year after ordering Japanese-Americans out of their homes, the government made every adult in every camp fill out a questionnaire. "This outrageous questionnaire was used to separate the so-called loyal people from the disloyal," said writer and historian Barbara Takei, who also attended the pilgrimage. 
 
 Jim Tanimoto remembers that two questions caused the most confusion and anger: No. 27 asked a person's willingness to join the armed forces – this, after being incarcerated. 
 
 "And No. 28 was sort of like a trick question, 'Would you cut your ties with Japan and the emperor?, " he recalled. "Well, I'm an American citizen and a Gridley farm boy. I have no ties with Japan or the emperor, so how was I supposed to answer this question?" 
 
 If he had no ties to begin with, he couldn't answer "yes" and cut them. But if he answered "no," the U.S. government would assume he was disloyal. 
 
 Tanimoto and all of the other young men in Block 42, his area of the Tule Lake camp, refused to answer. They were arrested and jailed in nearby towns, then at a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp nearby. 
 
 "I stood on my constitutional rights," Tanimoto said. "You can't do this to American citizens." 
 
 More people at Tule Lake refused to answer these questions, or answered no to one or both, than at any other camp. Additional fences and guard towers went up, and anyone in the whole camp system who didn't answer "yes" to both questions was labeled "disloyal" and was sent to the re-named Tule Lake Segregation Center. This was in the 1940s, two decades before the civil rights movement. 
 
 "Now, post-civil rights movement, we realize that the right to protest is a precious American right," Takei said. "It was something that the people who were imprisoned in Tule Lake exercised, and because of that they were punished." 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Gen Fujitani Courtesy of Gen Fujitani 
 
 A camp that was the largest 'city' in region 
 
 By fall of 1943, Tule Lake Segregation Center became the largest "city" in California north of Sacramento, ballooning to nearly 19,000 people, most of them labeled troublemakers. Camp got tense. With a larger workforce, the administrators expanded the farm, and expected a huge harvest, but the laborers complained of poor food rations and major safety concerns. 
 
 Then, a truck carrying Japanese-American laborers from the farm had an accident. Nearly 30 worker were injured. One died. Farmworkers refused to go back to work. 
 
 "They recognized that they had leverage by having the strike right when the crops are ready to pick," Takei explained. The camp director turned around and brought in Japanese-Americans from other incarceration camps to break the strike. 
 
 "These strikebreakers were also paid a dollar an hour, so in two days they could make more than a farm worker at Tule Lake would make in a month," Takei said. 
 
 Camp administrators would simply not let the fields go unharvested. A few days later, Takei explained, the Tule Lake laborers became even angrier. 
 
 "Workers saw a truck leaving the warehouse area filled with food," ostensibly to feed the strikebreakers. Some 200 people surrounded the truck. 
 
 "And that's what caused the camp director to call in a battalion, with the tanks rolling in, and the camp was shut down," said Takei. 
 
 Martial law 
 
 Japanese-American leaders were thrown in a stockade, with no legal recourse. Within days, martial law was declared. 
 
 This marked the end of large-scale farming, and the beginning of two tumultuous years at Tule Lake. The military raided barracks, and hundreds of people ended up in the stockade, then a jail, for months. There were more protests. A radical faction grew in camp, and eventually thousands of angry, scared, or confused Japanese-Americans imprisoned at Tule Lake renounced their U.S. citizenship, actions many felt were made under duress, and which took 20 years to reverse. 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Gen Fujitani Courtesy of Gen Fujitani 
 
 The Tule Lake Segregation Center closed in the spring of 1946, six months after the war ended. What remained were empty barracks that once housed families, and thousands of acres of rich farmland. Riichi Fuwa, 98, remembered that the land he and other Japanese-Americans improved got parceled off to veterans returning from war. 
 
 "When the soldiers came back and they wanted to farm, they could homestead that place," he said. 
 
 I asked him, jokingly, if he was offered that land. Fuwa just laughed. 
 
 Some former incarcerees returned home and eventually rebuilt successful farm businesses. Not Fuwa. His farm was overgrown, all the equipment stolen. 
 
 "There's no way to express that feeling when you see the place like that," he said. 
 
 He soon left farming forever. 
 
 By 1960, the number of Japanese-American farmers dropped to a quarter of their prewar presence. With lost farms, homes and businesses, it's estimated that wartime incarceration cost Japanese-Americans up to $4 billion in today's values. Some of those losses were compensated in 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed redress legislation offering a formal apology and giving $20,000 to each survivor. 
 
 The non-economic losses – to Japanese-Americans, to California, to the whole country – are impossible to measure. Especially now, Takei said, we must remember "how easily people — because of fear and anger — lose sight of our important national values of justice and rule of law." She drew parallels with Muslim Americans, refugees and immigrants, "as though demonizing other people is going to solve our problems." 
 
 All we have to do, she said, is look at the World War II incarceration of Japanese -Americans to see that's not true. 
 
 Lisa Morehouse is an independent journalist. This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative news organization. Meradith Hoddinott helped with research.
– There's one date that will live in infamy, per President Roosevelt, but Feb. 19, 1942, might qualify, too. It was on this day 75 years ago that FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which laid the groundwork for the internment of Japanese Americans. NBC News reports that some 80,000 native-born citizens were incarcerated in one of 10 hastily constructed camps along with some 40,000 immigrants. An apology was made by President Ford in 1976, and reparations for the "grave injustice" were authorized by Congress in 1988, Smithsonian reports. As the anniversary is marked, some of the best reading on the subject: "When I was in elementary school I never even heard that this had occurred." That's changed for William Belcher, who is now leading an archaeological effort to excavate the Honouliuli Internment and POW Camp on O'ahu. Read it at NBC News. Last summer, NPR reporter Lisa Morehouse traveled with Riichi Fuwa to what's left of Tule Lake camp, which sits just south of the Oregon border. "I wanted to see the place for the last time," the 98-year-old says. She looks at it through the lens of the forced agriculture that occurred there. In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times looks back on what it calls its "shameful response" to internment, which read in part, "The time has come to realize that the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots. It is not a pleasant task. But it must be done and done now. There is no safe alternative." You likely know Dorothea Lange for her famed Dust Bowl photos (especially this one) from the 1930s, but the War Relocation Authority hired her in 1942 to photograph the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Her photos were embargoed by the government for three decades. NBC News reports on her "misgivings" about what was happening. Read Executive Order 9066, which doesn't actually refer to Japanese Americans, at the National Archives, which also offers a history of the internment. Smithsonian has the story of Fred Korematsu, who fought against internment all the way to the Supreme Court (and told police he had minor surgery in an attempt to change his appearance).