Abstract
The Minidoka Pilgrimage is a journey taken by Japanese Americans to visit one of the World War II Japanese internment camps. I examine Minidoka Pilgrimages from a perspective that is critically informed by sociological and anthropological studies on the contemporary Shikoku pilgrimage involving a circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples. I focus on how Minidoka has come to be considered a sacred place, how the pilgrimages are conducted, and how the transformative effects of the pilgrimage resonate with the pilgrims. In Minidoka, the pilgrimage finds a symbolic sacred place of suffering for Japanese Americans and creates a space for the transmission to the next generation of internment camp experiences through the telling of stories. The pilgrimage is a community of story-telling characterized by its abundant orality and generativity. With the numbers of individuals with direct experience declining, Minidoka finds itself wavering somewhere between memory and history and engaged in a struggle to be historicized, making it an apt candidate for the oral history method.
