Hell Valley, Hawai‘i, USA - My new piece with PRX/Mellon Foundation is part of a 10-episode Monumental Series

Rellat onored to have produced this story, Hell Valley, Hawaii, USA alongside my colleagueHonolulu based print journalist and photographer J Matt + the entire PRX team. The whole series is excellent - and worth a listen! Recokoning with our monuments is series business, as you know. 


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Our episode looks at the people and communities behind a new monument in Hawaii, on Oahu. And some of the challenges that come with the U.S. Park Service's management of such sites, that commemorate and ackowledge horrible parts of our nation's past, like the forced incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry in WWII --- and how to prevent this in the future. 

Pearl Harbor National Monument is the most visited place in Hawaii, and it’s one of two national sites recognizing a foreign assault on U.S. soil. The monument tells the story of the Japanese Empire’s sneak attack on the island of Oahu in 1941 and how the U.S. declared war on Japan and entered World War II the following day.

But the U.S. government did something else that’s not often talked about: martial law was immediately declared in Hawaii, followed by the incarceration of men, women and children of Japanese ancestry. Just over ten miles from Pearl Harbor is the Honouliuli National Historic Site. It was Hawaii's largest and longest-serving World War II confinement camp, and it’s now being developed by the National Park Service as a new memorial space that will eventually be open to the public. It’s only when we look at Pearl Harbor and Honouliuli together, and see them as inextricably part of the same story, that we can reconcile who we Americans believe ourselves to be...with who we sometimes actually are. Hope you listen! Tell me what you think. 

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Reporter J Matt (left) + producer Caroline Losneck in Honolulu 2023.