Former Heart Mountain Incarceree Receives Grant From Wyoming Humanities Council

Sam Mihara, who was incarcerated at Heart Mountain as a child, has received a grant from the Wyoming Humanities Council to travel around the state and teach about the Japanese American incarceration that happened during World War II.

A board member of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, the 90-year-old Mihara is an award-winning educator who also received the 2022 Japanese American of the Biennium Award from the Japanese American Citizens League. Since he started speaking about his incarceration experience in 2011, he has delivered his presentations in person to more than 95,000 people.

The Wyoming Humanities grant covers three trips to take place in August, September, and October this year. He will visit Gillette, Buffalo, Sheridan, Jackson, Pinedale, Rock Springs and Evanston. Sam is also considering a tour of the southeast sector of Wyoming including Laramie and Cheyenne.

Mihara will also be at Heart Mountain in June and July as a faculty member for Heart Mountain’s workshops for educators sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to speak at a visit by the Bar Association of the District of Columbia and to attend the annual Heart Mountain Pilgrimage.

His work is part of the larger educational mission of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which includes in-person and virtual field trips to our museum and interpretive center. The Foundation is also building the new Mineta-Simpson Institute dedicated to spreading the sense of public service and bipartisanship exemplified by Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator Alan Simpson, who first met as Boy Scouts behind the barbed wire at Heart Mountain in 1943.

The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell.