HISTORIC JOURNEYS

OTULELAKE, Calif. n a late October afternoon, as icy shards of rain pellet the high desert, Angela Sutton pries open the metal door that seals off the old jail that once belonged to the Tule Lake war relocation camp.

The door swings open and we step into the pitch darkness, into air redolent of musty concrete.

Tule Lake, in a rural community in Northern California just a few minutes shy of the Oregon line, was the biggest and most notorious of the Japanese-American internment camps established by the U.S. government during World War II. Almost 120,000 people (mainly U.S. citizens) were incarcerated here for no other reason than their ancestry.

The jail is one of the camp’s few remnants and is now maintained by the National Park Service — one of an increasing number of such sites that deal with contentious issues of race and ethnicity in American history.

Sutton, an energetic young ranger who has worked with the Tule Lake Unit since it was established in 2008, picks her way through the darkness and brings a flashlight beam to rest on one corner.

It illuminates three columns of faded Japanese characters, marking a name and birth date: “Kawano, Toshio, year of 1919” — a man leaving humble evidence of his existence in what must have been dire circumstances.

“One piece of graffiti tells us this story of a person,” Sutton said. “And that is just one story of the thousands of people who came through this camp.”

When the National Park Service was established 100 years ago, it was with the intent of creating a federal agency that would “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects” in the nation’s wilderness area. But over the decades, the NPS’ portfolio has expanded. Of its 413 units, more than a third are historic places and sites — and it’s through some of these that the park service has begun dialogues about race.

That is the case at Tule Lake, as well as at the Nicodemus National Historic Site in Kansas, which harbors a roughly century-old settlement

PHOTOS by GARY CORONADO/LOS A monument, shown with the jail, above, in the background, at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest and most controversial of the sites where Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Today the site in Newell, Calif., is part of...