This panel will consider Japanese American wartime incarceration’s significance in the 21st century by calling on scholars and public historians to move beyond a single narrative and instead make space for many stories and methodologies. Writer Frank Abe will reflect on his 50-year journey reinterpreting camp history and, in particular, his recent project adapting John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) for the stage. At the center of Abe’s presentation is the role of playwriting and what the experience of wartime incarceration has to say about the threat of mass deportations and American concentration camps in the 21st century. Dr. Erin Aoyama will discuss her public humanities work at four High Plains National Park Sites: Bent’s Old Fort, Capulin Volcano, the Sand Creek Massacre, and the Amache National Historic Site. Dr. Aoyama will demonstrate how these parks together tell a story about racial capitalism and settler colonialism, as well as how a public humanities practice can confront settler memory. Dr. Hana Maruyama will turn to a recent exhibit on ceramist Minnie Negoro she and her undergraduate students curated at UConn. She’ll discuss the exhibit’s importance toward teaching public history, and the challenges of interpreting Japanese American incarceration history in the Northeast, a region outside dominant camp histories. PhD Candidate Julia Shizuyo Popham will introduce a method she’s terming "seeing irei" to interpret a portrait of Obon artist Fukunosuke Kusumi painted in 1944 while confined in the Amache Incarceration Camp. Pairing Black feminist thought with Japanese American spiritual practice, she’ll explore how camp art elucidates wider histories of empire and ancestral care.