Alta Journal is pleased to present the final installment of the five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” a historical essay by acclaimed novelist Karen Tei Yamashita. Visit altaonline.com/serials to read earlier installments, and sign up here for email notifications of future Alta Serials.
Last week’s “Part Four: A Proving Ground for Peace” examined the impact of war and the military’s presence on Delta. For the final installment of this serial, Yamashita discusses her responsibility as a storyteller.
Some time ago, while learning to write, I discovered something: someone is always telling the story. It doesn’t matter what sort of writing—a fairy tale or an email, fiction or history—a narrator with a character and a point of view is there behind the writing. And what that narrator knows and has lived are unseen and profoundly underpin the written text. The narrator might be me, the writer, but that me is always a character of me created to tell the story. This might make you wonder about everything you’ve read here up to this moment, and it should. I came to have a fascination with the idea of the narrator, but this knowledge came with responsibilities. I might create an unreliable narrator and expect the reader to understand this, to grapple with what is true and not true. Both the reader and I are responsible. I, for what I write; the reader, for what they read.
I am known to write fiction, and presumably this essay is not fiction. It is a historic account that I have organized in a particular way, an essay drawing from history to help me rethink what I thought I knew. Because I write fiction, I have a profound respect for history. History, the record of events that really happened, is necessary because we must be accountable. History is our connection to social justice. But we discover that history can be known in many ways, must be known in many ways, because some stories have been obliterated from the record. So we ask people who were there to remember what they remember, even knowing that memory is malleable, fuzzy, opinionated, but also true. The people who tell what they remember are also creating their own narrators, versions of themselves, to tell the story. We have a responsibility to listen. I believe that if the history in this essay is not factual, then it should be corrected, but I have tried my best to do my homework.
This brings me to the story of Topaz the museum. Each visitor to the museum is a reader of that history that is told in stories, through artifacts, photographs, paintings, reconstructions. Museums are fascinating places, like virtual books where we wander into the past, another world. The museum’s collection determines the stories. The things within the museum are nothing without the stories. In the case of Topaz, there is also the square mile of desert land, the physical ruins of the place. And there are the Topaz barracks, repurposed into homes scattered throughout Delta. This museum is not just its building and some artifacts; it extends into the town and surrounding environs. Deltans, as a community and among families, keep the myriad stories told and told again. And they’ve collected these pieces of the past and studied the terrain to protect them because that’s what we do when we care about our homes. Like the artifacts inside the museum, the landscape outside, without the stories, the old map, or knowledgeable guides, returns to being a vast desert covered in greasewood. Without its special designation as a museum and without its guardians, what would such a desert become? Industrial farmland? A military test site? Another prison?
I know that the scholar historians, the real people with memories, the writers and curators, all who contributed to make the museum narrative about this stuff and this land, argued long and hard, back and forth. It’s very complicated to create a collective narrator, to honor all the unseen lives that underpin the story. No one individual owns the correct story. Collectively, the story arises, opens in unpredictable paths. That’s the beauty of it. The result, the storytelling displayed in the Topaz Museum, is, I believe, powerful and deeply moving. But no matter what I think, each visitor, each reader must take the time and responsibility to know this for themselves.
Finally, my thinking turns to the purposes of the museum. I can think of many. It is the keeper of our history and the guardian of a historic place. For those with family and personal ties, it is a place of return for memorializing, prayer, healing, and reconciliation. In its recognition of the crimes of the past, it is a site for teaching and resistance. But I now know this: it is a fragile site and can easily disappear, become an abandoned dump site, return to the desert, the great Pleistocene Lake Bonneville. For this moment in time, a small, dedicated group of folks in Delta care for its physical place, artifacts, and landscape. They have taken the responsibility to be the storytellers, protectors, and activist docents of Topaz. Why? I’ve tried to understand. Maybe because they are teachers. Maybe because of their Mormon history. Maybe because of the land itself. I have tried to honor the story of Deltans because they have honored ours. It is here that our stories meet. It is here that we trek along a common path toward an uncertain but hopeful future.
Admittedly, I’ve told this story through the lives of a few individuals, in particular the Beckwith family, who have taken pains to stay on the sidelines, away from notice, to be recognized as part of a community. To be fair, there are many more people and stories yet to be told; I leave that work for others to follow.•
To learn more:
- Beckwith, Frank A., Indian Joe: In Person and in Background; Historical Perspective into Piute Life, DuWil Publishing Company, Delta, Utah, 1975
- Native Land
- Roberts, Brian Russell, Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2021
- Topaz Times, 1942–1945
- TREK, Vol. 1, No. 1 (December 1942), No. 2 (February 1943), No 3. (June 1943), Central Utah Relocation Center
- War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, WGBH Open Vault, interview with Susan Beckwith Dutson
- And with gratitude to Scott Bassett, Jane Beckwith, Jane Tomi Boltz, Boreth Ly, Sima Rabinowitz, Susan Straight, Patricia Wakida, and Tim Yamamura.
This completes our five-part serialization of “Trekking to Delta,” by Karen Tei Yamashita. Kindly drop us a note and let us know if you enjoyed this provocative essay. Sign up for more Alta Serials here.
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.
