PANA Pilgrimages to Manzanar

 

Initially a memorial ceremony to pray for and honor the dead by two friends, a Buddhist priest and Christian minister, the Manzanar pilgrimages have evolved into journeys that evoke layers of meaning, collective memory, healing and ongoing commitment for reconciliation, justice and compassionate service.  It is a journey “that frees the pilgrim from all that prevents heart-unity with others” (Gandhi). Our return to memory – recovering history and recovering from history, mourning and resistance – participates in the tearful release of rainwaters for life that flow into a new quality of time. The akkadian term for joy – hadû – conveys a sense of willingness and volition, as the ritual of mourning calls for joy to herald the moment of reaggregation into the community. Joy is intimately related to the theme of restoration.

On this 40th anniversary of the community pilgrimage, PANA lead a group on a spiritual journey(April 23-26, 2009) to the historic Japanese American internment camp site at Manzanar, California, to honor the thousands of people who were imprisoned there and at the nine other similar American camps. In this special year we celebrated the deep joy of being part of the movement of the heart, body and mind, a movement that seeks to restore relationship, to create us as a diverse people.

We went to this sacred place as a traveling community sharing stories and engaging in contemplative spiritual practices along the way.  We stopped at the burial site of Cesar Chavez and visited the National Cesar Chavez Center in La Paz, California as we recalled that the United Farmworkers march from Delano to Sacramento (1969) inspired the first community Manzanar Pilgrimage in 1969.   We had a guided tour with National Park Service interpreters/ archaeologists of the internment sites, and on Saturday joined with hundreds of other pilgrims from all over California and the Untied States in the 40th Annual Interfaith Ceremony and Obon Dance at Manzanar.  This journey was guided by Dr. Joanne Doi, MM and Rev. Deborah Lee.

 photo of 2008 pilgrims

Photo: 2008 PANA Pilgrims to Manzanar

History of PANA's Manzanar Pilgrimage

In 2006, PANA began offering an interdisciplinary course entitled "Manzanar: America's Internment." Joanne Doi, a Japanese-American Ph.D. candidate writing her thesis on the history of pilgrimage, taught a half-semester course preparing a diverse group of seminary students to travel together as a group joining the larger community pilgrimage to Manzanar. Most were compelled by the experience of Manzanar and/or the internment period, either because of a personal connection or a gap in understanding its significance; many also discovered such connections along the journey.

In 2007, the Manzanar course left the classroom and went out to the Japanese American faith communities as an immersion course, where seminarians and congregation members engaged together in a process of reflection, listening and re-telling of the stories and experiences of a particular Japanese American church community during internment, and its significance for the generations living in today’s post-9/11 context. The community "classrooms" in 2007 were Buena Vista United Methodist Church (Alameda), Sycamore Congregational Church (El Cerrito), Jodo Shinshu Center (Berkeley) and Channing Way Buddhist Temple (Berkeley).

Dr. Joanne Doi, MM, became Adjunct Assistant Professor of Intercultural Theologies and Ministry at Franciscan School of Theology. In the Spring 2008 semester, PANA offered "Pilgrimage — Manzanar Internment" as a full-semester collaborative course between FST and PANA. The first half took place in the classroom on the PSR campus and examined topics such as:

  • pre-internment Japanese American history;
  • the historian as curandera or healer;
  • the psychology of racial trauma and spirituality of negative emotions;
  • the metaphor of refuge and pathway in the Psalms;
  • the Manzanar Pilgrimage situated in Asian American movement history in the context of the Civil Rights and Liberation Theology movements;
  • critical faith and civil religion;
  • post-colonial pilgrimage; and
  • pilgrimage practice.

The second half of the course returned to the off-campus "classrooms" where, in the context of shared narratives, body, memory and ritual, we touched upon reparations and reconciliation, wounded resurrections and solidarities, and multi-faith community.

The culmination was the Third Annual PANA Pilgrimage to Manzanar itself, Thursday April 24 - Sunday April 27, 2008. En route, we also visited the Cesar Chavez Center near Tehachapi, as we recognize the inspiration that the United Farmworkers march from Delano to Sacramento gave the Manzanar Pilgrimage back in the late 1960s.

April 2008 marked the 39th annual community pilgrimage to the former WWII site of Japanese American incarceration at Manzanar, California. This tradition began in 1945, as an annual ceremony to honor those who died in the "camp," led by a Buddhist priest and Christian minister
together. The generation during the late 1960s joined the annual
pilgrimage to continue to honor the dead, to reclaim their collective memory and suppressed history, and to listen to the painful stories of their parents evoked by the gathered community in what has become a sacred site, and to listen to the reverberations inside themselves of both inherited trauma and healing. This garnered the emotional energy for the redress and reparations movement, which culminated in the legal victory of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Yet even after 1988, the pilgrimages continued. Now spiritual reparations, as we revisit our memories and feel compassionate solidarity with other groups suffering
similar traumas in contemporary times, enable the continuing process of redress and imagining a different world.

Links of interest:

  • The Manzanar Committee, sponsor of the annual interfaith Pilgrimage to Manzanar. Since 1969 the Manzanar Committee, a non-profit educational organization, has sponsored an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar. Former internees, their families, friends, and a growing number of young people gather at the Manzanar cemetery to remember, to honor, and to carry the lessons of this experience into the future. Website includes a history of Manzanar and the Committee, photos, poetry by participants, a description of the intergenerational Manzanar After Dark program, a few publications, and a list of Manzanar-related links.
  • The Manzanar Committee blog
  • The Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service website.

 

2009

My Nisei Life - by Mei Nakano, at pre-pilgrimage panel presentation at Emanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol, CA.

Reflections - poetry by participants

2008

PANA Pilgrimage to Manzanar short film by Jun Stinson (YouTube, 8:26)

Flags for Manzanar video clip (YouTube, 1:18)

Testimony of Nisei Gloria Morita, internment survivor, given April 7, 2008.

Photos:


2007

Reflections from the 2007 PANA participants.

News articles about the 2007 pilgrimage:

Course Descriptions

"The difference between tourism and pilgrimage is the intent of the journey. The tourist seeks to escape history, to vacate, involving intentional acts of forgetting, detachment and disengagement. The tourist is generally not asked to consider how one’s life is connected to the history of the place (and its people) one visits. But the postcolonial pilgrim’s journey seeks restoration towards a regained wholeness by a re-centering, re-entering and recovery of history; it is a rediscovery that we are part of a living and vital collective memory. It is not an escape but a returning to the center of pivotal events that marked us, embedded in the land itself. Pilgrimage is about reconnection with each other, with our ancestors, with mystery and the depth of life. As we intentionally journey together, we experience together more than we could alone. ."
--- Dr. Joanne Doi