Voices: My family was imprisoned in internment camps. I’m watching our government do it again.

I’ve always liked the “Star-Spangled Banner.” I sang it countless times at University of Utah sports games and at school assemblies.

My dad, Winston, is a really good guy. He wakes up early to turn on the kettle so my mom has hot water for her tea as soon as she shuffles into the kitchen. He takes us camping in southern Utah, a place he knows like the back of his hand. He is resourceful, handy and artistic. If the entryway has been tidied up or your gas tank is newly full, it was him.

My dad never puts his hand on his heart during the “Star-Spangled Banner.” I tease him about this.

“I don’t believe in putting my hand on my heart to ‘pledge alliance’ to a piece of cloth,” he tells me.

“Daaaad,” I reply. “It’s not allegiance to that piece of cloth. It’s symbolism!”

A few years ago, my dad told me he doesn’t put his hand on his heart because he saw a photo of a little girl in a Japanese internment camp facing the flag, her chubby hand sandwiching a white identification tag to her heart.

Originally from Berkeley, California, my grandmother was sent to the Rohwer internment camp when she was a toddler. My family doesn’t really talk about it. My dad and I were raised on scarce references to time at “camp,” the tone tilted downwards at the unspoken.

But on my 18th birthday, I sat with my grandmother on the couch and she told me she was sent to Rohwer and then Gila, Arizona. She recounts how her father did not like being in camp, so they were eventually sent to a farm in Idaho. She mentions her father’s dislike with something like fond exasperation, employing the same tone I use with my dad.

I haven’t teased my dad about the flag since. The song still gives me chills, but I’ve stopped putting my hand on my heart.

On my coffee table, I have a copy of “Chiura Obata: American Modern.” An artist who lived down the street from my grandmother in Berkeley, Obata’s reverence for nature shaped his work, with Sierra Nevada and Yosemite emerging as his most iconic subjects. I adore his art; the fusion of Eastern techniques and the American West’s landscapes feel like me.

With watercolor and silk, Obata’s “Moonlight Over Topaz” captures an early morning before the moonset at Topaz internment camp in Utah, where he was a prisoner. Indigo saturates the top of the silk and fades into green before softening into the yellow fabric. Beneath this sky, a row of purple mountains stretches across the horizon, the tallest peak dusted with snow. Below, a smattering of structures — four barracks, two watchtowers, a fence — breaks up the landscape’s stillness. A full moon hangs above the mountain; Obata found comfort in this reliable celestial figure. He could find no solace in the camp, but the moon is a steadfast friend.

The painting holds a multitude of Japanese artistic signatures, from the gradations in ink to the positioning of the viewer. The latter creates a sense of unmooring. We’re ungrounded, dangling like Obata. This country, his sole home for four decades, had imprisoned him, had sent armed soldiers to monitor him like a criminal. Homeless, he had only melancholy and paint. The scene depicts early morning, suggesting he’s been up all night, contemplating this, painting only now by the dawn’s early light.

I know why this book is on our coffee table. By painting American landscapes, Obata asserts that this is ours, too.

The West is not just Manifest Destiny and cowboys, but the home of Asian Americans who built its railroads, cities and cultural landscape. To paint Yosemite and the Grand Canyon with his Japanese hands is to lay a claim: This land is my land.

This land where my dad took me camping and where his dad took him. Where he showed me how to make a fire and where to dump grey water. I know how my hiking boots grip slickrock, how sand feels in my sleeping bag.

I know my dad is a patriot, whether he puts his hand on his heart or not.

But look at my government now. You did this to my family, now and you’re doing it again. You called us enemies and domestic terrorists and criminals. My grandmother was four years old, barely younger than Liam Ramos. You knocked on her door and forced her family from their home.

James Wakasa was walking his dog near Topaz, and his killing was ruled as “justified.”

Renee Good was dropping her son off at school.

This is the land of the free. We must remember that.

Hazel Inoway-Yim is a student at Santa Clara University. She was born and raised in Salt Lake City.

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