Details announced for Manzanar Pilgrimage
Event scheduled for April 29
The Manzanar Committee announced that Manjusha Kulkarni and Dr. Arthur A. Hansen, will be among the featured speakers at the 54th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage, which will be held live and in-person, conditions permitting, at the Manzanar National Historic Site on Saturday, April 29, 2023, at noon.
The committee also announced that bus transportation to the Pilgrimage will be available from Los Angeles (details below).
Kulkarni is the Executive Director of the AAPI Equity Alliance and a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate. Hansen, one of the leading scholars documenting and researching Manzanar and the Japanese American Incarceration, is the author of the new book,
Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America’s First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp.
Also featured will be Brenda Ling, superintendent, Manzanar National Historic Site and James Matsuoka, son of the late Jim Matsuoka.
“Our Legacy: Generational Struggles For Democracy” is the theme for this year’s Pilgrimage, which will be dedicated to the late Jim Matsuoka of NCRR, and the late Rev. Alfred Tsuyuki of Konko Church of Los Angeles.
“Our 54th Pilgrimage is being held nearly 78 years after Manzanar was shuttered,” said Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey. “Yet many of the challenges and issues our community faced remain with us today. We continue to fight for democracy and talk about equality and racist violence.”
“Manzanar, for many reasons, symbolized the negation of democracy,” added Embrey. “But we believe it is as important as ever to lift up Manzanar as a beacon for democracy and human rights. It is a place where we can gather to demand a better America precisely because it is a place where our community struggled to preserve democratic values. It is a place where our families, even while living behind barbed wire,
worked to hold our nation accountable to the promise of equal treatment under the law. This is what we mean when we say our legacy is one of struggling for democracy.”
“Our families fought for decades to be heard and to regain their rights. The decades-long battle to rebuild shattered lives and disrupted communities, to gain political representation, for redress, for ethnic studies - that’s our legacy. We want to lift this up in gratitude and so that we all remember democracy must be nurtured and guarded. The challenges facing our community, our country, must be confronted with strength and determination if we wish to be true to our legacy.”
For the daytime Pilgrimage program, cultural performances will begin at 11:30 a.m., while the main portion of the program begins at noon.
The 2023 Manzanar At Dusk program, will follow the afternoon Pilgrimage program, conditions permitting, at 5 p.m., at Lone Pine High School gymnasium, located in Lone Pine, California, approximately eight miles south of the Manzanar National
Historic Site.
Now in its 25th year, Manzanar At Dusk is cosponsored by the Nikkei Student Unions at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, California State University (CSU), Fullerton CSU, Long Beach, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego.
Further details about the 54th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage and the 2023 Manzanar At Dusk program will be announced at a later date.
Both the Manzanar Pilgrimage and the Manzanar At Dusk program are free and open to the public.
For more information, call (323) 662-5102, or send e-mail to info@manzanarcommittee.org.