On Tuesday, a group of legislators visited Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which exists to remember anti-Asian discrimination and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. 

Before the tour, Joint Agricultural Committee Chairman Rep. John Winter, R-Thermopolis, used an anti-Japanese racial slur while discussing the historic site.

Closing out a morning of testimony and lawmaker discussion on agricultural and public land issues, Winter, who represents a district that includes a portion of Park County, took a minute to remind his fellow lawmakers of the upcoming visit to Heart Mountain. 

“If you’re gonna go to the,” Winter said, before pausing, “Jap camp, that’s what I call it, we need to leave here by about 12:30,” he said with a chuckle.

WyoFile reviewed a livestream video of the meeting.

The slur stretches back to the war but has been largely abandoned as offensive and dehumanizing toward Japanese people. The word is labeled disparaging and offensive by every major dictionary, an online search reveals, and has been dropped from popular use long ago. An association of major newspapers in New York, for example, urged dropping the term in the early 1950s after a campaign by Japanese American activists.

“The excuse that the term ‘Jap’ is usually used without any derogatory intention is pointless,” activist Shosuke Sasaki wrote in a letter to the association, according to the Japanese American history organization Densho. “It frequently has been and is being used with the connotation of contempt.”

“It’s unfortunate that now, in 2025, we still hear language like this,” Heart Mountain Interpretive Center Board Chair Shirley Ann Higuchi told WyoFile in a phone interview Tuesday. Her parents were among the more than 14,000 Japanese Americans interned against their will and under guard at Heart Mountain during the war. 

“I feel that Rep. Winter should become better educated,” Higuchi said. “If someone made that comment to me anywhere I would have to speak to them about the appropriateness of that description.” 

Winter, a Republican who’s been serving in the House since 2019, did not respond to two voicemails and a text message from WyoFile seeking comment Tuesday afternoon. 

It was appropriate for the agricultural committee to visit Heart Mountain, Higuchi said, because the people interned there — many of them farmers uprooted from California — contributed to the history of the industry in that part of Wyoming. “It’s an agricultural committee, you’d think they would respect what we did there historically, and it’s unfortunate this remark put a sour taste in everybody’s mouth.”  

In the video, three of Winter’s fellow lawmakers are visible when he makes the response. Two smiled and a third dropped his head down in a rueful manner.

The committee’s lone Democrat, Rep. Karlee Provenza of Laramie, said the current presidential administration’s focus on deporting mass numbers of immigrants, and widespread concerns that federal agents are depriving people of their civil rights while doing so, makes Heart Mountain’s historic lessons more important than ever. 

The internment of Japanese Americans was “a horrific display of what happens when we strip people of their constitutional liberties and their civil rights,” Provenza said. “I guess I’m just grateful we were able to take a tour of Heart Mountain after that committee meeting so that my colleagues were able to see just how awful the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans was, so that we never do anything like this again.” 

Winter’s comment came just three months after the death of renowned U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, who grew up in Cody and made remembering Heart Mountain, and condemning that dark chapter of the nation’s history, a focus of his public persona and political advocacy. Simpson is famous for his lifelong friendship with Norman Mineta, after the two met as boys while Mineta was interned at the camp.

Mineta went on to serve as a U.S. congressman from California, and the two men, though of opposite political parties, worked together to pass the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which included an apology and $20,000 to those internees still alive at the time. 

The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center is preparing to honor Simpson this summer, Higuchi said. 

Winter also grew up in northwestern Wyoming. In the committee meeting he noted that growing up, he had lived in refurbished barracks from the internment center. “They can be made pretty nice,” he said. 

Tim French, the committee’s Senate chairman, told WyoFile he and Winter lived just a few miles from each other in their youth. French’s family came to the area after the war as homesteaders. Families of veterans, like his, received portions of the acreage used for the Heart Mountain internment center, according to a National Park Service history. They purchased barracks buildings from the federal government at extremely low prices and moved the structures to their ranches. They were very cold domiciles in the winter if not refurbished, French said. 

The state senator, a Republican from Powell, said he was “a little shocked when co-chairman Winter said that.” But it was also a memory of his childhood, French said, when children of the area referred to Heart Mountain by that term, which they had picked up from their parents. French, who is in his early 70s, said the two area lawmakers are only a few years apart in age. 

Their parents were mostly veterans of the war, he said, and “that was the term. They were still angry. I grew up with that term. I didn’t know any better. It wasn’t a vicious term growing up, it’s just that’s what it was.” But with time, he said, and after getting to know a Japanese-American family who moved in nearby him, he learned to drop the slur from his lexicon. 

“I decided ‘gosh, I grew up with that, but I’m not going to use it any more,’” he said. “You mature and you grow up.” 

Area history aside, Winter, French said, “shouldn’t have said it.”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.