Eighty-two years after Japanese Americans were sent to incarceration camps during World War II, a new exhibit at the Moab Museum focuses on Utah’s lesser-known Dalton Wells prison camp.
Once a Civilian Conservation Corps camp just outside of Moab, it held 56 so-called troublemakers from camps across the West for 106 days in 1943. The captives were later transferred to Leupp, Arizona.
Though few artifacts remain, Executive Director Forrest Rodgers said they’re able to tell the story of the people who were held there through “correspondence and photographs of families.”
Dalton Wells was an isolation camp, unlike Utah’s larger and better-known Topaz Internment Camp. The camps were still prisons, but they were technically legal, and there was space for continued community and interaction among people held there.
Isolation camps, on the other hand, “were treated and managed like a prison,” Rodgers said. “There was much more control, much more oversight, and much more rigorous attention from the camp commander and guards.”
These camps were illegal because no part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066 that enacted Japanese incarceration allowed for isolation camps.
The museum has been careful to use language that reflects the experience of the people who lived in these camps. According to Rodgers “we used to call them internment camps, but the proper and appropriate term for them is incarceration.” The exhibit also avoids calling them relocation camps which was a descriptor used to simplify or sanitize the tragedy taking place.
Even though Dalton Wells was 10 miles outside of Moab, Rodgers said few people knew what was happening at the time. At a preview of the exhibit for members, he talked to one woman who grew up in Moab and said “we never knew that story, we never knew that there was something out there.”
Rodgers hopes the exhibit will help locals and tourists gain “awareness that prompts reflection.”
That’s something Jani Iwamoto worked on during her time in the Utah Senate. She sponsored a bill in 2022 that marks Feb. 19 as a day of remembrance for Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII.
Iwamoto’s own family was excluded from the camps because they were not on the West Coast, but her grandfather was “a leader in the community so he was taken away from the family” and imprisoned in what was then Sugar House Prison in Salt Lake City.
“My Mom and I, we walk the park all the time, Sugar House Park, and I say ‘Well did you realize grandpa was incarcerated below us?’”
“I always say this quote that ‘Justice is a matter of continuing education,’” said Iwamoto. “We need to learn about our stories so that we don’t repeat history.”
Many people want to shy away from telling stories that highlight difficult or regretful parts of history, but Iwamoto said “we need to know about each other's pasts even though they’re uncomfortable because without that you can never move forward and make real change.”
The exhibit will be on display through June 29.
