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By Julia Shizuyo Popham

Dana Ogo Shew is an oral historian and interpretive specialist for the  at Sonoma State University, where she pairs community-outreach with public history to create interpretive plans, products, and exhibits for historical sites. Dana is involved with many projects, but what brings us together is our shared investment in the , one of the ten Japanese American concentration camps that the US government maintained from 1942-1946. In 2010, Dana completed her MA in Archeology at the University of Denver, where she wrote about the lives of women at Amache. Combining field archeology, oral history, ethnography, and public history, Dana explored how women at Amache cultivated community and resilience within contexts of incarceration. Dana is also a descendant of ancestors who were forcibly removed and confined in the Topaz Incarceration Camp in southern Utah. Informed by her family’s experience, Dana is committed to lifting up underrepresented BIPOC voices and, through that, changing how public audiences come to know US history.

What would you say is your work’s overarching mission? 

There are many components to my job, but the throughline is to help tell or, in some cases, retell histories from underserved, overlooked perspectives and then to bring all that to the public in ways that are relevant and engaging. So I’m interested in interpreting the past for public audiences. But more than this, I’m committed to elevating historically underserved and overlooked voices. My goal is to give people—from first-time visitors to narrators—something to connect to, something to feel proud of, and something to learn from. The whole point of sharing stories is to learn from them, right? So the challenge for me is to tell those stories in such a way as to bring in wide audiences—many of whom might not think they have anything to learn—and to honor and give a platform for that site’s community. 

Tell me about your work in oral history? What draws you to it? 

The best part of my job is making connections with people through oral history. Every so often someone I just met will trust me enough to share personal or moving stories from their lives. Those are some of my favorite times.

Ten years ago, I met and interviewed an elderly man, Norm, for a Japanese American flower growers project. Only later did I learn that Norm had been confined as a child at the Topaz Incarceration Camp, the same site my family was at. I had been researching toddlers at Topaz, but I didn’t realize that Norm was one of them because Topaz’s government records only use his Japanese name, Makoto. It was only when Norm came to one of my Topaz presentations and saw a photo of himself that we were able to connect the dots. He looked at the photo and exclaimed, “hey, that’s me!” From there he became a part of my Topaz Toddlers project. Just a few weeks ago Norm said to me, “I really gotta thank you. You got me to come out of my shell and to start thinking about my childhood at Topaz. I wouldn’t have otherwise.” Norm’s statement is living proof that oral histories can validate the importance of people’s lives.

Right! Oral history is more than collecting narratives for posterity. Through oral history, people can narrativize their own lives—their own histories.

Exactly. Oral history is an act of listening and an act of telling. My job is to listen and to validate. I’m listening and recording. I’m telling the narrator that what they are saying is important. And especially when the topic is difficult or traumatic, oral history can be cathartic and therapeutic for the narrator. 

What advice would you offer someone interested in doing community-engaged public history work? 

If you want to work with the public—meaning you want to receive feedback, input, and perspectives—then you need to be ready for the unexpected. We tend to assume that we’re going to hear a certain perspective. And a lot of times we’re right! Someone’s story often confirms what we already know. But other times it comes from out of left field. It just is not the feedback we were looking for. You need to be ready for that so you can actually address the discord. Your goal is to be a translator and an interpreter for the public even if the responses are different than what you had envisioned. It’s not about shaping people’s stories into your ideology or your plan. It’s their voices that should be shaping your project—not the other way around.

When you talk about listening and staying open, the word that comes to mind is humility.

That’s absolutely it! We get caught off guard sometimes because we’re sitting there thinking we know everything. No, we have to approach a community project with a little bit of humility, recognizing that we don’t know everything. Part of this, too, is figuring out how to balance perspectives. Most histories have a majority perspective, but we should always be asking: Who are the outliers? What do they have to say? We also need to make sure that we’re paying attention to different communication styles. There are a lot of opinions, and anger tends to be the loudest. 

But anger shouldn’t just automatically get the most say.  

Right! That’s why it’s okay to take a step back and at least try to hear everything in an unweighted way. Loud, on its own, shouldn’t get more weight. 

What would you say in the most challenging part of your job interpreting historical sites?

Sometimes my favorite part is also the most challenging. Collaborating with many invested groups—whether they be clients or historical societies—is difficult, especially when it comes to public interpretation, like writing signs for national historic sites. Trying to balance what everyone wants and then turning that into something cohesive, compelling, and fewer than 150 words is hard. Oftentimes people don’t want to give up their priorities, but we simply can’t cover it all. If we were writing an article, I’d say, yes, let’s get all of it in. But we are trying to reach the public and make something that they’ll actually read. So, it can’t look like a giant essay, right? It has to be just a few lines. 

How do you do it then? How do you balance multiple investments when writing historical signs?

I’ve learned to say no—which is hard! But, again, I only have so many words. For me, it’s about finding that balance between concise interpretation and multiple perspectives. That’s why I also incorporate other ways, like images and QR codes, to give visitors options to look more in-depth.

Okay, so it’s clear that you simply can’t include everyone’s perspective. When it comes to your work creating public interpretations for the Amache National Historic Site, how do you prioritize voices? Do the voices of incarceration survivors automatically outweigh those of descendants, allies, and scholars?  

That’s a good question. There’s a natural prioritization based on urgency and age. Survivors of the Amache Incarceration Camp combine those two priorities, so they get priority hands down across the board. Whether you agree with them or not, survivors have firsthand perspectives, and we only have them for a limited amount of time.

Outside of survivors, it’s not about who’s voice is more important. It’s about who’s voice is most relevant to a particular project and audience. We use the voices that will help create the most powerful and impactful message. So, audience here is key. Now that Amache is a national park, it’s going to get a whole bunch of visitors who have no background or previous knowledge of the camp or even Japanese American internment. Reaching out to those visitors and learning what they do or don’t know and what they need to know is now a major priority. That broader public is who we’re interpreting for. 

What do you hope visitors to the Amache National Historic Site will learn? What would you want their takeaway to be?

Of course we want people to walk away and say, “Holy crap, I can’t believe this happened.” But we also want them to remember the resilience of Amache’s Japanese American community. We want visitors to understand that Japanese American incarcerees kept going. Of course the anger, injustice, flagrant racism, and disbelief are all there, but we hope that visitors will leave with a deep respect for the ways that Japanese American incarcerees asserted their humanity despite everything being stacked against them. It’s important, too, that survivors and descendants walk away from the site with some pride.