What is our Heritage?

Wednesday, July 16, 2025
written by Rev. Dr. Mike Hegeman

Last week our SAGE (Senior Adults Gaining Enrichment) went on a field trip to the Arizona Heritage Center on the edge of Papago Park, in Tempe. A Pinnacle member had suggested the center as an interesting place to visit, and indeed it was! The center focuses on the Phoenix Metropolitan area from the mid-19th century to the present day. We learned about the early settlers and the life they sought to build around Arizona’s five “C’s”: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus, and climate. We learned about historic and iconic businesses and cultural organizations. One thing I never knew was that the U-Haul company was founded here in Phoenix and is still headquartered here. The end of our tour even took us through an exhibit dedicated to the “Phoenix LIghts,” an event where on inexplicable yet widely-seen set of lights travelled over Nevada and Arizona on March 13, 1997. The Heritage Center offered us a highly-educational overview of life here in the Valley of the Sun. 

One exhibit stood out for me, dealing with life here during WWII. We learned about military training that went on here, civilian response to the war, and about how there were both German prisoner of war camps and Japanese internment camps close by. RIght in what is today Papago Park was a camp that primarily housed German naval personnel (Kriegsmarine) and had a capacity of 3,000 prisoners. Notably, it was the site of the largest POW escape in the US during WWII, involving 25 prisoners who dug a tunnel, using tools given to them by their guards. These German prisoners had asked if they could build a volleyball court, but they used the tools to create make-shift canoes and dig a tunnel. When they finally escaped, they found that the Gila River they had been planning to use their canoes on didn’t have any water in it! All the prisoners were eventually captured and re-interned.

We had a Pinnacle congregation member (who has passed away) whose father was a German prisoner of war in America, who liked the US so much that after the war, he was determined to bring his family here to live; and he did. The Germans were relatively well-treated here. 

The story changes for the Japanese Americans. 

Here’s a little something I learned about the history of Japanese people in the Valley of the Sun: 

By 1900, there were 281 Japanese living in Arizona Territory, but only eight Japanese men in Phoenix, including a merchant, two servants, and five men working in a restaurant. In 1905, 120 Japanese were brought to the Salt River Valley to establish a sugar beet farm. By the mid-1930s the Japanese population of Phoenix had grown to about 600. In 1934, local white farmers became concerned that Japanese immigrants and their children were becoming too numerous. There were violent attacks against Japanese farmers, whom local white farmers deemed the menacing “Yellow Horde.” Fields were purposely flooded, buildings set on fire, and bombs tossed at Japanese farmhouses. Mobs of local white farmers attacked multiple farms with gunfire, pushing Japanese vehicles into canals, sometimes with Japanese people inside. This violence continued for over a year as well as legal action taken to try and expel Japanese farmers from the state. (https://azhistory.net/aahps/f_japanese.pdf) 

All of this led up to the 1941 creation of internment camps in Arizona that eventually housed over 30,000 Japanese people, many of them coming from California. Local Japanese-owned farms in South Phoenix were confiscated (very few were ever returned to the land owners after the war). When I did a little internet search on the Arizona Japanese internment camps, I learned about the two major camps, Poston (near Parker) and Gila River (situated on the Gila River Indian Reservation). Both camps were situated in a desert environment with extreme temperatures. Life for these Japanese Americans was quite difficult, especially when they did not know what their future would hold. Very few Japanese-owned farms exist in South Phoenix today, but there is a Japanese Friendship Garden in Phoenix, which I have visited several times. It does stand as a place of reconciliation for the harm done to people of Japanese ancestry here in Phoenix. 

[There was another Japanese internment camp here in Arizona, down in Cochise County: The Triangle T Ranch in Dragoon, Arizona, was used during World War II as a secret internment camp for Japanese diplomats. Specifically, it housed Japanese consulate staff from Honolulu. The ranch was chosen for its remote location and ability to be kept out of public view. The primary goal was to hold these individuals in a secure location while also keeping them away from public scrutiny and anti-Japanese sentiment. You can still visit the Triangle T Ranch and even stay there.]

The Arizona Heritage Center turned out to be quite a lesson in history, providing us with important reminders of how our metropolitan community came together with its successes and failures at creating a community where all are treated with dignity and respect. Christian scriptures repeatedly exhort us to treat the stranger in our midst:

"When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God." Leviticus 19:33-34

In a hundred years, what exhibits will the Arizona Heritage Center have that reflect who we were in the 2020s? What will be our legacy and heritage, as people of faith, for those who come after us?