Frank Abe

Abe is the lead author of a new graphic novel, We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. He won an American Book Award for JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, and made an award-winning PBS documentary, Conscience and the Constitution.

Erin Aoyama

A Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, a researcher at the HMWF, and a Heart Mountain descendant. She studies the experience of Japanese Americans within a broader context of American racial studies, examined through the lens of solidarity history.

Dr. Mary Keller

A member of the American and Diaspora Studies faculty at the University of Wyoming, Keller examines the relationship of religious lives to struggles for meaning and power, and an organizer of Return to Foretop's Father.

Dr. Karen Korematsu

Founder and executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute. The institute seeks to collaborate with education partners, and to create a national resource center for Asian Pacific American history and civic education.

Hana Maruyama

A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, studying Japanese American incarceration in context of US colonialism. She is also a research fellow for an American Public Media podcast on the Japanese American incarceration.

Dr. Amy McKinney

A history professor at Northwest College, McKinney is an expert in Wyoming history and life at Heart Mountain and has also taught high school history in Wyoming. She is the descendant of a Montana Homesteader.

Sam Mihara

A former child incarceree at Heart Mountain who became a scientist for Boeing, he now speaks worldwide about the incarceration. He received the Paul A. Gagnon Prize from the National Council on History Education in 2018.

Dr. Donna Nagata

A professor at the University of Michigan, she is an expert on multigenerational trauma of Japanese Americans and author of Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-Generational Impact of the Japanese American Internment.

Dr. Gordon C. Nagayama Hall

He is a Professor of Psychology in the clinical psychology program at the University of Oregon. His paternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from England and his maternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S.from Japan in the early 1900s. His mother and her family were incarcerated at Poston, Arizona during World War II because they were Japanese Americans. His research interests are in culture and mental health with a particular interest in Asian Americans.

Noriko Sanefuji

She is a museum specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, co-curator of Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II and coordinates the Day of Remembrance program in Washington, D.C.

Hanako Wakatsuki, M.A.

Wakatsuki is the first superintendent of Honouliuli National Historic Site in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Wakatsuki served as the Chief of Interpretation and Education at Minidoka National Historic Site working closely with the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial unit and the Japanese American Confinement Sites network.

Noel Two Leggins

My born Crow Indian name is Ootchiashbaaiase “Watcher of the Night,” but on the agency rolls I am Noel Two Leggins. A proud enrolled member of the Crow (Apsaalooke) Tribe, member of the greasy mouth clan, child of the whistling water clan, live among the river Crow band along the Little Big Horn located in the black lodge district, member of the Night Hawk Society, devout sundancer of the Crow-Shoshone Sundance, descendant of Chief Two Leggins, Chief Pretty Eagle and Big Medicine who were leaders and great spiritual individuals among the crow people.

Dr. Duncan Ryuken Williams

He is a professor at the University of Southern California, author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War and is a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition.