The project, Sintetos explained, is a “melding of our nerd spheres.” Both she and Aoyama have spent time working at former Japanese American internment camps — Sintetos at Tulelake, California, and Aoyama at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Both have experience teaching American history to young students, and both have engaged in public-facing scholarship. In 2018, Sintetos organized a Japanese Incarceration Mobile Workshop that saw a handful of students, including Aoyama, travel to various internment camp sites up and down the West Coast; musician and activist Kishi Bashi joined the group to film part of a forthcoming documentary about Japanese incarceration. And Aoyama was a member of musician-scholar duo No-No Boy, which tells stories about the Asian American experience through folk music and has garnered national attention.

The two dreamed up their National Park Service grant proposal while hiking up Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aoyama said. 

“Since Nicole’s mobile workshop, we’ve both been engaged in different ways of bringing our scholarship to the public,” Aoyama said. “We asked each other, what is missing from the history curriculum? What tools do teachers need to focus on this topic? How do we bring to life these more remote sites that are very difficult to visit? By the end of the hike, we had our project.”

Neither Sintetos, who grew up in California, nor Aoyama, a native New Englander whose grandmother was forced into an internment camp at age 20, remember learning much about Japanese American incarceration in their childhood history classes. They surmise that many American children know little about those who were confined in camps because they live far away from the sites, making field trips challenging. Even for those who do live near the former camps, it’s often hard to access the land or learn about its history: Some sites have since become private farmland or are still in use as U.S. Army bases. One site, Fort Sill in Oklahoma, was slated to become a migrant detention center in 2019 until activists, many of them Japanese American and Native American, helped convince legislators to re-examine that plan.

“I remember that when I worked at Heart Mountain, the camp in Wyoming, I found it weird — this place that carries so much historical significance, so much pain, is mostly farmland now,” Aoyama said. “We think it’s important to juxtapose archival photos with images from today, not only to show people what’s still there but also to show what isn’t there. In some places, the barracks are gone. In some places, there’s barely any signage recognizing the history of the camp. That lack of acknowledgement, that lack of presence, says something, too. In some cases it’s just as poignant as a monument or a sign.”

Using geolocated audio storytelling and immersive virtual reality images, Sintetos and Aoyama hope to tell a nuanced yet easy-to-follow story of Japanese American incarceration, military power and settler colonialism to students, teachers and the general public. They’ll bring history to life with personal stories from former internees, perspectives from Native American tribe members, historical background and drone footage. And they’ll draw out themes that connect the past and present, inspiring people to fight against current injustices.

“If we are to work toward a more just future, we have to understand the present — and to understand the present, we have to understand the past,” Sintetos said. “The forms of injustice we’ve seen in the last few years — migrant children being separated from their parents at detention centers, people from mostly Muslim countries being banned from visiting the U.S. — those are echoes of the past. If we can learn more about our history, we can confront those injustices and break the cycle.”