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Forward Into the Past

At Camp Amache, a school project reopens an ugly chapter of Colorado history.

A A A Comments By Jonathan Shikes Thursday, Sep 13 2001

Before Hopper became a teacher at Granada High, he worked as a roofer. Those skills came in handy as he and his students spent countless hours this past spring and summer designing, building and painting a new roof for the little block house at the Camp Amache cemetery -- the one that covers the 1945 memorial to the former internees.

John Hopper (center) and his students spent countless hours over the spring and summer building a new roof.

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And it's not just any roof. "It's in the Shinto, or pagoda, style," Hopper says. "It's got the sway-style roof to it."

"We could have put a straight roof on it, but we wanted something with a little pizzazz," adds Hada, whose Optimist Club chose the design and color, red. "It's a traditional Japanese color."

During the school year, the students will lay cement for a pathway leading from the dirt parking lot into the cemetery; they'll also redesign their Web site, continue work on a journal of Amache recollections that they hope to get published and replant trees. "All of a sudden, I find myself plowing fields, planting trees, building roofs," Hopper says. "They got lucky that I know how to do some of it."

But Hopper recognizes that he got lucky, too. "You look across the United States, and this history has been hidden, in a sense," he says. "It's only in the last decade that we've really focused back on it. Even when the Japanese got their reparations, it wasn't that big a deal. Now it's a different story. All ten camps are trying to do something. I kind of fell into it at the right time. If this had been 25 years ago, I don't think much would have come of it. There wasn't that political sense of righteousness. I guess I won the lottery when I got hired."

And he just keeps winning.

When his students tore off the block house's dilapidated original roof, they found several enormous fossilized trilobites hidden underneath. "We don't know who built this, but whoever it was must have thought they were valuable and stuck them up there," Hopper says. "Maybe they thought somebody would come back and come across them someday. Some of us would say, 'Oh, another fossil,' and flip it to the side. But in the many years that I've dealt with the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, I've learned that they value a lot of things.

"They're very thorough, and they understand the importance of history. This place never stops surprising me."