WASHINGTON — Rep. Jay Inslee is pushing the government to establish a national monument at an old ferry dock where 227 Bainbridge Islanders were marched at gunpoint on their way to internment camps 64 years ago.

As Inslee lobbied the secretary of the interior in Washington, D.C., six religious leaders blessed the site in Puget Sound on Thursday in preparation for the groundbreaking for a memorial.

The Bainbridge Island families were the first of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans nationwide sent to World War II internment camps under President Roosevelt's executive order. The project at the old Eagledale Ferry dock — a memorial wall and new dock — is expected to cost $4 million.

The Bainbridge memorial committee wants the government to designate the ferry landing a satellite unit to the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Idaho, once the site of an internment camp. The application has been under review in Washington, D.C., for more than a month.

On Thursday, Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, urged outgoing Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton to expedite the study necessary to determine if the memorial qualifies for national park-system status.

"The vast majority of former Japanese American internees have already passed away, and the few remaining survivors are reaching advanced age and most are in declining health," Inslee wrote, explaining his haste.

About a dozen survivors attended the interfaith ceremony Thursday morning at the old dock. But only a week before, another island survivor died. And within the previous month, one of the youngest Bainbridge Island survivors — born in an interment camp — also died.

"We've had survivors at both ends of the age spectrum die," memorial committee Chairman Clarence Moriwaki said. "It only increases our race against time."

The site is marked by a granite stone, with the inscription, "May the spirit of this memorial inspire each of us to safeguard constitutional rights for all. Nidoto Nai Yoni. Let it not happen again."

Inslee described the memorial as "an important reminder, especially in a post-Sept. 11 world, about the dangers of allowing fear to guide national policies."

Moriwaki expects the study will recommend the memorial become part of the Minidoka monument. That would give the Bainbridge memorial federal status and protection. Public comment on the pairing has been overwhelmingly supportive, he said.

Enough state and private money has been raised to pay for more than half the project, according to the memorial committee. Moriwaki expects construction to begin on a memorial story wall and pavilion by late fall 2006. The memorial also will include an interpretive center and a 150-foot-long dock to recognize the 150 Japanese Americans who returned to the island.

The Bainbridge Island internees' story deserves national recognition in part because it tells of those who were both the first to be removed from their homes and the last to be released from the internment camps, Moriwaki said.

"This will be built," he said. "But it's going to be very hollow if the people we're honoring aren't there."

More local news headlines...