For the tribes of the Yakima Indian Federation, the word yakima meant beautiful land, but for the Japanese settlers in the early ‘twenties, yaki meant burning, and uma meant horse. Their ideographs take on additional significance when considering the racist campaigns directed against them by the American Legion, the local, state, and congressional politicians, the newspapers of the Yakima Valley, and the Hearst papers in Seattle and California.

The media in the 'nineties are focusing attention on strained Japanese/American trade relations and on ceremonies, exhibits, and religious services to mark the end of the War in the Pacific. Dr. Heuterman details the Japanese-American experience in the two decades leading to the internment, after the outbreak of World War II, of western-region Issei and Nisei, the immigrants and first-generation Japanese Americans who came to farm the marginal lands of the Yakima Valley in eastern Washington after World War I.

Professor Heuterman, distinguished member of the faculty of the Edward R. Murrow School of Communications at Washington State University, uses the newspaper accounts in the Washington newspapers of the period to demonstrate a growing, systematic, institutional racism directed against the Japanese-American communities of Wapato and the surrounding area. Alongside the accounts of protests against the presence of Japanese tenant farmers on land the American Legion misguidedly thought should go to veterans, there are stories of Japanese-American contributions to the social and economic life of the region, as well as their efforts to share their rich cultural heritage with their neighbors.

Many readers will be indignant when this book reminds them of the fragility of the social fabric in a region whenever a segment of the population is accorded second-class status; others will be moved to tears by the fortitude of these Japanese-American families, who strove to adhere to the best principles of American democracy in the face of prejudice, harassment, violence, and, finally, dispossession and internment.