Alta Journal is pleased to present the third installment of a five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” a historical essay by acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita. Each week, we’ll publish the next portion of this provocative reconsideration of the internment of Japanese Americans at Topaz within the larger contexts of geology, Indigenous history, the Cold War, and recent examinations of responsible storytelling.
Last week’s “Part Two: People and Land” explored the rich (and overlooked) history of people who lived in the Delta area prior to World War II. In “Part Three: The Teachers,” Yamashita introduces those who educated the imprisoned Japanese American students there and one who instructed local students in the 1980s.
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up for email notifications when each new episode is available.
Around 1973, discussions began between Utah’s Intermountain Consumer Power Association and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to explore a joint venture to produce a coal-fired power station. Think about it: California is the proud state of energy conservation and environmentalism, but if Utah doesn’t oppose coal-burning, that’s an opportunity. The L.A. Department of Water and Power has operated two main sources of energy produced by coal, one in Delta—the Intermountain Power Plant—and the other on the Navajo Nation near Page, Arizona. The Navajo Generating Station was retired in 2019; the Delta plant has plans for conversion to natural gas and green hydrogen by 2025. In the meantime, the energy from Delta helps churn the engines of the great Southern California metropolis, the City of Angels.
Construction of the Intermountain Power Plant in Delta began in 1981, and this is where my story finally seems to begin—or to return. Because at this juncture, Jane Beckwith, granddaughter of Frank A. Beckwith, was a high school English teacher in Delta, and her journalism class was filled with the just-moved-in, disenchanted sons and daughters of those hired to build the Intermountain Power Plant. Why, these high school kids complained, did they have to move to this godforsaken desert Podunk? Indeed. It must have felt like being evacuated to be temporarily imprisoned.
What I’ve come to understand is that the incarceration of my folks was also, among many things, like the installation of a corporate prison in a destitute rural area where folks need work, that it was one event in a series of boom-and-bust events in a struggling desert town. The good news is that the prison industry hasn’t been necessary in the Delta of today. We think the desert is empty, but it’s not. Its resources are hidden in the earth or the soil that can be irrigated to provide, and this land is always subject to human acquisition and greed. But certainly, the desert’s hidden resource is also its people who live, survive, and persist. And perhaps so too are the stories and cultures of people relegated to the margins, forgotten. The Ute, the Goshute, and now my folks.
I can recall, from kindergarten on, my many teachers, their faces and words, the particular moments of care and clarity and epiphany, their work invisible because as students we didn’t understand at the time; it would take a lifetime, and in the meantime, they would all pass away into unsung oblivion. But that’s the way it is with teachers; they, and eventually we who become teachers, are just teachers.
Topazans remember high school teachers who enlisted to teach, among them Eleanor Gerard, Melvin Roper, and Mary McMillan. Why these people made the choice to teach in a Japanese American prison camp is a meditative question churning around my thinking here.
I read that Eleanor Gerard braved the dust storms to teach her classes. I peruse Gerard’s photograph collection, archived at the Topaz Museum, and imagine her years there. In Topaz, she met her future husband, Emil Sekerak, a conscientious objector who chose service at the camp in lieu of guns. After the war, the couple moved to Hayward, California, where she taught high school until her retirement.
Mel Roper taught industrial arts, touching on design, mechanical engineering, and wood. Under his instruction and among many projects, students crafted furniture and auctioned their handiwork in camp. He worked to insulate the classrooms for the winter months, and during the summers he sponsored day trips to Oak Creek Canyon. A truckload of students spent a day throwing baseballs, wading into the creek, and feasting on a picnic of fried chicken, corn on the cob, and watermelon.
Mary McMillan, a missionary expelled from Japan in 1941, also chose Topaz. As the war ended, she returned to Hiroshima to teach at Jogakuin College, a women’s school, working with hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombs.
And there were those imprisoned who became teachers, among them Chiura Obata and Matsusaburo and Hisako Hibi, who taught art; Haruko Obata, who taught flower arrangement; Miné Okubo and Anne Yamauchi, who taught elementary school; Dave Tatsuno, who taught public speaking; and many others.
I’ve heard the names and praises of these teachers. Their students, now mostly dead, would have remembered particular stories, but I find few here to tell, only that these teachers, in a dark and hostile time, made a difference.
Some say teaching is a calling. I guess no one goes into teaching to get rich, so it must be a calling. Jane Beckwith got the call in the second grade. Her sister would go on to take over the family business, the Millard County Chronicle, but Jane left for nearby Provo, graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English, and began her career in the far southeastern corner of Utah in the city of Monticello. Later, she taught on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. On Navajo land, she lived in a trailer house. Her students, Navajo and ranchers’ children, often lived without running water or electricity. She taught English and the yearbook class, and she still hears from some of these students from time to time. For a short year, she tried working in an advertising agency in Salt Lake City, but she missed the classroom and returned to teaching on the Navajo Nation. Eventually, she went home to Delta, that’s right, to teach.
As with the teachers in Topaz, I hear scattered and incomplete stories about the teacher Jane Beckwith. But from what I hear, what I know, Jane was a natural—inventive, creative, provocative, one of those teachers who felt free to teach. So when her class read the poet Wallace Stevens, usually in May, she had students march around campus in single file, reading “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I can hear their voices now: “Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Then, to read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, she had students stack desks and chairs at the back of the room, cover the floor with blue poster paper, create a giant raft at the center of the classroom, and set forth down the Mississippi. And when, in 1984, she taught George Orwell’s 1984, the school became a stage for Big Brother, with students posting signs like “Ministry of Plenty” and, outside the vice principal’s office, “Ministry of Love.” Meanwhile, some students “vaporized” others by patching them with “V” stickers. Theater of the absurd. Literature became another way of knowing and experiencing the world. If we can change the way we see and know, maybe we can change the world.
In 1982, a year after construction began on the Intermountain Power Plant, hundreds of new families and their teenage kids moved to Delta. Many of them had lived in Saudi Arabia and in the Philippines, and this American town in Utah was the most backward place they had lived in yet. What to do? Jane Beckwith had a journalism class divided between old and new young Deltans. Like her grandfather Frank before, she would impart respect for this land and its history. So she sent these students into the community to discover Topaz. Seek out this history, record what people remembered, discover what residue of the place and events remained. The students conducted interviews, recorded oral histories, read and researched, discovered that some of them actually lived in the repurposed barracks of the dismantled camp. Unknown to this generation, the tar paper structures that had served as homes to imprisoned Topazans were scattered around the town and on nearby farms. Students became as local community archaeologists, gathering artifacts—photographs, yearbooks, journals, dolls, furniture, crafted shell brooches, polished deadwood, carved slate with embedded fossils, dishes, paintings, wooden clogs—every piece with a story, a cabinet of wonders, a significant archival collection. But evident to students was that Delta, their home, could be mapped over time—this land, place, and people understood as a significant historical archive.
As always, there is more to this story: how the Delta students won the opportunity to compete in National History Day in Washington, D.C.; how they heard Minoru Yasui speak in Salt Lake City; how they eventually met the Japanese Americans of Topaz and some of their children; and how, over the years, they were entrusted with more artifacts and memorabilia. But what is most remarkable to me is that a journalism teacher and about 36 high school students were the beginning of the Topaz Museum.
And one last note about teachers. Most of the docents who volunteer at the museum today, give tours and tell stories to thousands of visitors and busloads of students, are former teachers.•
Next week: “A Proving Ground for Peace”
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “Trekking to Delta,” and sign up here to be notified by email when each new installment is available.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a professor emerita of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.
