For a duration of 6 weeks, I formed part of an internship researching the internment of Japanese-Americans at the Cultural and Heritage Center of the Muzeo. Without a doubt, this opportunity has been the most interesting, and perhaps important, during my senior year.

Even as a child, history has fascinated me. It astounded me how something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago can remain relevant or have a strong impact on our  modernized and progressive society. This internship taught me that history doesn’t have to be many generations away to learn from them and have an impact.

In 36 hours, I learned more about the internment of the Japanese-Americans than I ever have in all my years of schooling. My disconnected knowledge and learning about the internment camps and the life of the internees soon ended as the stories of these people became more than information from a book.

The internees were like me in every single way: they all had families they loved and cared for, they joined clubs like me, they applied to college like me, they had homes like me.

But I’ve never been separated from my family, forcibly taken out of school or kicked out of my own home.

In this day and age, not much has changed. The people of America have found themselves under the guidance and pressure of leaders who push for their propaganda and their own agenda. Movements are rising up to protect the basic constitutional rights of each and every people no matter their race, their ethnicity, or their gender among other factors.

This internship has given me the opportunity to see firsthand(with primary sources like newspapers, school yearbooks, etc.) the consequences of an ununited nation.

We preach change and we beg for it, but we do nothing to achieve it. We hope that this information will prove to be educational to those that visit the exhibit. In this exhibit, the life of those who have been wronged is seen in every display.

It is time that we practice what we preach. It is time to go out and demand change from our representatives. It is time that we do right by them and make changes to our current political and social reforms.

It is time.