The Patriotism of Protest: Draft Resistance in Confinement, an exhibit featuring the history of draft resistance at Heart Mountain, will open Sunday, May 17, at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.

Sixty-three resisters were tried together in June 1944 in the largest mass trial in Wyoming history. Another group was prosecuted and convicted in early 1945. The resisters were convicted and sentenced to two- or three-year terms at federal prisons at McNeil Island, Washington, and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. All were pardoned by President Harry Truman on Dec. 24, 1947, and some, including 100-year-old Takashi Hoshizaki, a Heart Mountain board member, served in the military during the Korean War.

Profiles of eight of the 85 draft resisters will be featured in the exhibit, including Hoshizaki.

Cally Steussy, Heart Mountain's director of interpretation and preservation, developed the exhibit with Eric Muller, the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina Law School. Muller helped create the interpretive center's permanent exhibit and is the author of “Free to Die for Their Country,” the groundbreaking history of draft resistance among Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.

Visitors to the exhibit will be directed by QR codes to more information about the resisters on the Heart Mountain website at heartmountain.org/collections-archives/draft-resisters/. HMWF collected and digitized the War Relocation Authority files for each resister thanks to a grant from the Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) program of the National Park Service.

Also coming soon to the interpretive center is an AI-driven interactive video featuring Hoshizaki in which visitors can ask questions about his experience at Heart Mountain.