Contributors

POLLY AIRD is an independent historian in Seattle. She is the author of Mormon Convert, Mormon Defector (Oklahoma, 2009), which won the best biography award from the Mormon History Association in 2010. She is also the coeditor with historians Will Bagley and Jeff Nichols of Playing with Shadows (Oklahoma, 2011), winner of the best documentary book by the Utah State Historical Society in 2012. She has written for the Utah Historical Quarterly and other historical journals.

JAMES M. ATON is professor of English at Southern Utah University and board president of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance. He is the author or coauthor of six books on the rivers, artists, and explorers of the Colorado Plateau.

JANE BECKWITH taught English for thirty-nine years and worked in an advertising agency for one year, while wishing she were still in a public school classroom. For more than three decades, she has worked to preserve the Topaz National Historic Landmark and create the Topaz Museum in Delta, Utah. Beckwith is currently the president of the Topaz Museum Board.

EDWIN P. HAWKINS, JR. is the executive director of the Office of Economic Development on the staff of the Mayor of the City and County of Honolulu. Born in Japan, son of an Air Force sergeant and a Japanese mother, he has spent a lifetime immersed in international affairs. As president of the Japan-America Society of Hawaii, Hawkins promoted cultural exchanges as well as reconciliation programs. A retired Air Force colonel, Hawkins is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Harvard University, and Japan National Institute for Defense Studies.

CHRISTIAN HEIMBURGER is a historian for the Joseph Smith Papers and a coeditor of the Joseph Smith Papers, Documents: Volume 5 (2017) and Documents: Volume 9 (2019). He received a Ph.D. in modern American history from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

JERRY D. SPANGLER is an archaeologist and the executive director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of cultural resources on federal lands. He is the author or coauthor of four books on the history and archaeology of eastern Utah.

DONALD K. TAMAKI is a partner at the San Francisco-based law firm of Minami Tamaki LLP. In keeping with his firm’s tradition of community service, Tamaki served on the pro bono team that reopened the landmark Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. the United States, overturning Fred Korematsu’s conviction for refusing as an American citizen to be incarcerated on account of his racial ancestry. Mr. Tamaki is past member of the board of Glide Foundation and is the board president of the San Francisco Japantown Foundation.

RANDY WILLIAMS is the curator of the Fife Folklore Archives and an oral history specialist at Utah State University Special Collections and Archives and a board member of Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection. Along with managing the world-renowned Fife Folklore Archives, she directs community-based fieldwork projects, bringing the voice of historically excluded people into the archive.

SHERI WYSONG is a self-described map geek who bought her first atlas at the age of thirteen. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1984 with a B.S. in Medical Anthropology. Due to the complete lack of demand for graduates in that field, she eventually found work with the Bureau of Land Management in the pre-GPS days and spent countless hours in Utah’s West Desert, navigating her way with USGS maps. Studying historical maps led her to several interesting discoveries, some of which are shared in her article.