The sun was warm on my back and I read the posted notices from the US government, the word Japs again and again. Japanese American citizens, Kira’s family, suitcases in their hands, dressed in layers of their best clothes, even elegant hats, waiting on the dock, armed white soldiers lurking beside them and in the periphery. A tiny little girl in a wool coat smiled in the arms of a white soldier wielding a huge gun. A young mother held an infant, both visibly tagged with numbers, not names. Grandmas and grandpas, mothers and fathers, and siblings rounded up while their neighbors watched. Ripped away with virtually no warning from their homes, farms, beloved pets, and friends. Gone.

Then photographs from the camps. From Manzanar. Razor-wire fences and gun towers in the desert, keeping the families imprisoned to appease white America’s rabid, racist fear. The American government betraying its own people, handing out gold stars to Kira’s great-grandmother, to all the mothers of dead sons, killed while fighting for the America that put them in this prison.

I stood, mesmerized by the faces of a group of teenagers. They looked like my age. In the yard at Manzanar, in the dust and dirt. Smiling. Friends or cousins or siblings, but together. And rising behind them, above the tower and the shacks and razor wire, away but not far in the desert, I recognized Mount Whitney, the highest peak in all the continental United States and, if you start walking in Yosemite Valley, the end of the John Muir Trail.

One more cruelty. Imprisoned beneath the freedom of that mountain, its soaring beauty turned to a looming taunt.

We walked to the water’s edge, where the dock once stood, where Kira’s family was marched at gunpoint to a ferry that took them away from home, to an unknown future. Today the water sparkled, quiet and calm.

“I didn’t get any artistic tendencies or talent from my great-grandmother,” she said.

“You did,” I sighed. “It’s not debatable; it’s an established fact. You are an artist.”

“I didn’t inherit it from her,” she said.

“Those birds are works of art,” I said. “That she didn’t make art before or after has nothing to do—”

Kira shaded her eyes from the sun. “No, I’m not related to her. Not by blood. None of us are.”

I blinked in the light from the water. “Not related to who?”

She sighed. “Muir. Keep up. To my great-grandma.”

“Why not?”

“Because my grandma was an orphan. My great-grandparents adopted her.”

I stood, blank-faced. “She wasn’t a baby? In the camp?”