Sybil Tubbs, education manager for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, is scheduled to speak on Friday, April 12, as part of the 2024 Global Studies Seminar at Northwest College. Tubbs will share the story of Mary Oyama, a Japanese American woman incarcerated at Heart Mountain during World War II, while exploring xenophobia throughout American history.

Tubbs will speak at 2:45 p.m. in the Yellowstone Building Conference Center, and the public is invited to attend her free presentation, which focuses on Oyama, a journalist from California who was forcibly relocated to the Heart Mountain Confinement Site in 1942. While there, Oyama reached out to the people of Powell through her newspaper column, Heart Mountain Breezes, and explored the importance of learning about other cultures in order to counteract xenophobia.

Even after Oyama and her family were allowed to leave the camp and resettled in Denver, she continued to correspond with her readers in Wyoming. Upon returning to California following the war, Oyama resumed her role as an encourager of literature and social reform and remained active in the Japanese American community for the rest of her life before her death in 1994.

Tubbs’ presentation and the 2024 Global Studies Seminar is sponsored by the International Foreign Language Program at the U.S. Department of Education.