The UI Extension’s Southeastern Idaho Journey for Diversity and Human Rights, June 22 to 24, 2006, will depart from Pocatello and include several themes including impacts of the Japanese-American internment camps from 1942 to 1945.

It can be taken for one UI credit or professional development credit for teachers. It is designed for community members and anyone who wants to better understand Idaho, including those in business, education, social services, health care, and government. Workshop fees will be determined once the full itinerary is set.

Participants will visit the Minidoka Internment National Monument, 20 miles northwest of Twin Falls, one of 10 U.S. concentration camps established in 1942 after Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Most of Camp Minidoka’s 10,000 residents, many of them children, were shipped via train from Seattle and Portland to this 950-acre site to live in tar-paper barracks with no insulation, running water, or interior walls. Barracks were heated by coal-burning stoves.

“When you are in the heart of a culture, hearing today’s generation re-telling the oral history passed down from their ancestors, it becomes a part of your own being and creates an understanding that cannot be learned from a book or a lecture,” says Barbara J. Smith, veteran of both 2005 workshop tours. On staff with the UI Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department, she would “definitely recommend this tour to anyone.”

For details, email famcon@uidaho.edu, call 208.885.6546, or watch for syllabus and registration form at www.agls.uidaho.edu/fcs/; follow the “Take the Journey” link.