Thirty miles east of Kooskia, the Clearwater National Forest of North Idaho hides a World War II internment camp where University of Idaho students and researchers spent their summer digging up history.
Seen as enemy aliens during World War II, 256 Japanese men lived in the Kooskia internment camp between 1943 and 1945. Since then, the site has been virtually forgotten. There is nothing to commemorate it. The area is not marked by signs, and UI’s students and researchers had to haul their equipment through mosquitoes and across a creek from the hotel they lived in during the four week field class just to access the site.
Stacey Camp, a professor of anthropology at UI, has lead the program since the first field class in 2010.
Camp said working on the project is exciting because of the historical significance and the many exciting discoveries that come with working on the site.
“We’ve had people that come out there specifically because their family is connected to internment camps,” Camp said. “They feel connected and feel that it is an important project.”
Jessica Goodwin, a student studying for her master’s degree in anthropology and crew chief on the project, said Japanese internment was especially interesting because she wasn’t taught about it in school.
“I thought it was great that I was part of this effort to expose the truth,” Goodwin said. “It doesn’t bother me that it’s an ugly part of history … that makes it a worthier study.”
Before Kooskia was an internment camp, it was a federal prison. Camp said that items found on the surface are from the camp, and the ones below are from the prison.
“That’s why signage is so important,” Camp said. “Schools can come through there … beyond what we’ve done already, we need people to know this happened.”
Archaeologists study camps like Kooskia across the country and in Canada, and Idaho alone has two: Kooskia and Minidoka.
Though Kooskia is not as big as other internment camps in the U.S., it is unique because it held the first internees that the U.S. government tried to use as a work force — and is still a neglected historic site.
Camp said they are also interested in the differences and similarities between the Japanese internment camps and the larger German and Italian prisoner of war camps across the Western U.S.
“This is part of a bigger subfield of historic archaeology called Archaeology of Institutional Confinement,” Camp said.
Robert Heinse, assistant professor of Geophysics at UI, has also worked with Camp on her research project and said that all they had to start with was old photographs and maps.
“She was very much interested in the life of the internees,” Heinse said. “How they would have spent their leisure time.”
In 2010, Camp said she and her students spent the summer looking at barracks. This year, they focused on a landfill located in the camp. Everything they find is photographed, intensely recorded and catalogued.
This summer, they have uncovered 319 bags of artifacts. Camp said the finds will hopefully go on exhibit either on site at Kooskia or a museum in Seattle.
Each summer project requires $40,000-60,000 to run the four-week field school. Camp writes grants to obtain the funds from an annual fund called the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant. The grant is sponsored by the National Park Service.
“We’ve had three grants total, one to do lab work and two for field work,” Camp said.
Because there is such a specific grant program, it is a little easier to receive funding, she said. Hopefully, with the national media and archaeological finds they have exposed, the project will continue in the upcoming years, Camp said.
“It’s a pretty heavy place, I think,” Camp said. “There are places that you work on that do have this heavy feeling or emotion to it.”
Alycia Rock can be reached at [email protected]