• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Voice From the Past: Elk Grove Teacher Honored As Historical Figure

Posted on: Thursday, 16 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Brian Joseph, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Mar. 16--Mary Tsukamoto continues to touch lives eight years after her death.

This year, about 6,500 fifth-graders - 3,000 from the Elk Grove Unified School District alone - will study curriculum she developed in 1983. Some of these students will come from a Sacramento elementary school that bears her name.

And this month, through celebrations of women's history, the country will learn of her activism on behalf of her fellow Japanese Americans.

Tsukamoto, a former teacher in the Elk Grove district, is one of 10 National Women's History Month honorees. She joins a former prisoner of war, an artist and a cultural anthropologist as representatives of this year's theme, "Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams."

She was selected by the National Women's History Project, the group that helped establish Women's History Month in 1987, and her story will be retold in segments on XM satellite radio and on the Lifetime television channel this month.

"This is a tremendous honor," said Tsukamoto's daughter, Marielle, a retired administrator at Elk Grove Unified. "She would say, 'Gosh, there are so many other people that deserve this honor.' "

Tsukamoto taught in the Elk Grove district for 25 years, but perhaps her greatest teaching moment came after she retired in the mid-1970s.

Buoyed by a growing sense of discontent over how Japanese Americans were treated during World War II, Tsukamoto became a key activist in their fight for redress.

She argued that for the U.S. government to make amends for holding Japanese Americans in internment camps, it had to pay restitution. In 1983, she developed the Time of Remembrance, a living history program for Elk Grove Unified that included interviews, photographs and artifacts from internment camps.

Tsukamoto was 27 when she and her husband, Al, and daughter were shipped to an internment camp in Arkansas in 1942.

Tsukamoto later wrote about her experiences with Elizabeth Pinkerton in the book "We the People: A Story of Internment in America." She also worked with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to develop an exhibit on internment.

Marielle Tsukamoto said two of her mother's proudest moments came in 1988, when the U.S. government apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and granted each detainee $20,000, and in 1992, when Mary Tsukamoto Elementary School opened on Brittany Park Drive in Vintage Park.

"She wasn't caught up with recognition so much as doing something for a cause," said Marielle Tsukamoto, who was 5 when she and her family were placed in the internment camp.

The Time of Remembrance program continues to be taught through a partnership between the Elk Grove district, the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts and California State University, Sacramento. It now reaches students across the state.

"She's just an amazing woman," said Linda Wharton, the National Women's History Project board member who nominated Tsukamoto after reading about her on the Web.

"It's not only about what she did in life," Wharton said, "it's about her legacy today."

Wharton, who teaches constitutional law at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, said she wanted to nominate an activist associated with the Japanese internment, because the story is relevant today, when civil rights are sometimes trampled in the post-9/11 world.

"It's such a powerful thing to know about, because history repeats itself," Wharton said. "What a powerful lesson about what happens when fear kicks in."

Tsukamoto's memory also will be honored this month at receptions in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

The reception in Washington will be held at the Hay-Adams Hotel, which was once a center for activists opposed to women's suffrage, said Molly Murphy MacGregor, executive director and co-founder of the National Women's History Project.

The irony, she said, is intentional.

"We just go and help their karma out," MacGregor said.

Somewhere, Tsukamoto is smiling.

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Sacramento Bee

More News in this Category