Nebraska museum tells stories of Japanese Americans during dark chapter [Video]

GERING — Chadron rancher Sharon Hagihara Bartlett walked the nearly empty, grass-covered grounds of the Amache National Historic Site in southeast Colorado and thought about her mother, her aunt, her grandmother.

“I’d never been there,” she said about Amache, one of 10 “relocation centers” where the U.S. government imprisoned thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. “They had torn down or sold all the buildings because it was an embarrassment to the U.S. government and what they had done.”

As Bartlett wandered by concrete foundations and a few reconstructed structures last May, her thoughts flowed like a conversation with her ancestors.

“Oh, my God, here were all these people …