The long journey to Eagledale Dock

There were 227 people who walked down Eagledale Ferry Dock that day in March 1942, clutching their babies and belongings, tags attached to their clothing.

Four months earlier, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that people of Japanese descent on the West Coast, most of them U.S. citizens, be confined in internment camps. More than two-thirds of the Bainbridge Island residents, the first group sent to internment camps under Order 9066, were American. Sixty-two of them ended up in the European theater, fighting for the country that confined their families.

Four presidents have apologized, reparations were authorized and paid.

Congress has acted again to honor these specific people who were forced from their homes — the business owners, neighbors, co-workers, schoolchildren — by designating the memorial under construction at the former Eagledale Ferry Dock part of the national parks system.

This week, the House followed the Senate in approving an omnibus public-lands bill that makes the former dock and memorial a satellite site of the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Jerome County, Idaho.

Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, pushed for the concept for years, first winning money for a study and then persistently pushing for legislation. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., also sponsored the bill. Now the bill goes to the president for his signature.

The omnibus bill, which consolidates some 60 pieces of public-lands legislation, accomplishes many important things, not the least of which is finally designating 160,000 acres of national forest in East Snohomish County as the Wild Sky Wilderness Area.

But it is especially enriched by an important message — the theme of the Eagledale Ferry Dock memorial: Nidoto nai yoni. "Let it not happen again."