Nisei Trials: 80 Years, Remembering the Minidoka Draft Resisters

In September 1944, thirty-seven Japanese Americans unconstitutionally incarcerated at Minidoka War Relocation Center appeared in Federal Court in Boise for violating the Selective Service Act. Join Friends of Minidoka to commemorate and explore the courage of these Nisei men who fought for restoration of their citizenship, the legacy of their actions, and parallels today through Distinguished Lecture with scholars Frank Abe, author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse and Eric Muller, author of Free to Die for Their Country, American Inquisition, and Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe. Please visit minidoka.org to learn more and register.

Time & Location

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Cost: Free

Doors open: 6 p.m.

Presentation starts: 6:30 p.m.

Location: Rick Allen Room in the Herrett Center, Twin Falls, ID

Presenter

Eric Muller: Eric Muller, Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics, is an award-winning teacher and internationally recognized expert on the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States from 1942 to 1946. He joined the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 1998 after spending four years as an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Since 2011, Muller has also served as a faculty member with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics and has served as the organization’s Academic Director since 2018. He has published four books on Japanese American incarceration:

• Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America's World War II Concentration Camps
• Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II
• American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II
• Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II

Frank Abe: Frank Abe and Eric Muller each brought the story of resistance to wartime incarceration to light at around the same time. In 2000, Abe wrote and directed the award-winning PBS documentary, Conscience and the Constitution, on the draft resistance at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, while in 2001, Muller published the first book on the draft resisters, Free To Die For Their Country, which included the Minidoka resisters.

Abe is also lead author of the graphic novel, WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press, 2021), named a Finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Washington State Book Award. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2018), and is currently developing a new stage adaptation of No-No Boy.He and Floyd Cheung have edited a new anthology, THE LITERATURE OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION (Penguin Classics), published in May 2024.