Daily Sitka Sentinel

Beleal Earns Japanese American Award

By ABIGAIL BLISS
Sentinel Staff Writer
        Harriet Miyasato Beleal, widely recognized as an exemplar of public service in Alaska, has received national acclaim for her decades of advocacy for education and equality.

Harriet Beleal (Sentinel Photo)

        The Japanese American Citizens League has selected Beleal as one of three recipients of the Japanese American of the Biennium Award, the organization’s highest public award recognizing Americans of Japanese ancestry for achievements in their given fields. Beleal, who has both Native Alaskan and Japanese heritage, has been recognized for her contributions to education/humanities.
        She will receive the award July 19 at JACL’s 2018 National Convention’s Sayonara Banquet in Philadelphia, along with two other recipients, Diane Narasaki and Lynne Nishijima Ward.
        Beleal was nominated by her daughter, Paulette Moreno, and was informed two weeks ago of the honor.
        While Beleal was “shocked” by the news, those familiar with her record of volunteerism may be less surprised.
        At 84, Beleal is an active member of the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Alaska Native Sisterhood, which two of her great-grandfathers helped found, and has contributed more than 70 years of work to the organization.
        She points to her efforts, in collaboration with Gerry Hope and Isabella Brady, and with support from Sitka’s state senator Bert Stedman, to revitalize Sitka’s ANB Hall and assure its financially sustainable future, as one of her most salient accomplishments.
        She is also proud of her advocacy for the Sitka School District Cultural Programming Director/Sitka Tribe of Alaska liaison position, currently held by Nancy Douglas, and successful lobbying in Anchorage, Sitka, Juneau, and Washington, D.C. for the reopening of Mt. Edgecumbe High School as a chosen representative of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council. She attended the ribbon cutting ceremony at the boarding school’s reopening in the 1980s, and was this year’s keynote speaker at MEHS Founders Day.
        JACL’s recognition is only the latest is a long line of awards Beleal has received. In her nomination, Moreno listed her mother’s accolades as the Sitkans Against Family Violence Woman of Year Award (2015); Tlingit and Haida Delegate of the Year First Runner Up for Community Involvement (2012);  the Alaska Native Brotherhood’s Andrew Hope Coogeenia for Lifetime Outstanding Service (2012); Sitka Tribe of Alaska Elder of the Year: Lifetime Recognition for Civil Rights of People  (2013); Minidoka Pilgrimage: guest panelist on Alaska Empty Chair and the Alaska Story (2015); the National Park Service Redress Letter (2015); and Sitka Tribe of Alaska Tribal Citizen of the Year Volunteer, Activism & Influence (2018).
        Beleal’s influence has been felt well beyond Sitka, especially in Anchorage, where she lived for more than three decades.
        “When I left Anchorage in 2005, April 16 was declared Harriet Beleal Day, by (Mayor) Mark Begich,” she said. “I got awards everywhere I went.”
        One of the motivating factors for Beleal’s contributions to the community is her own life story of personal resilience.
        Beleal was born to George Kamachi Miyasato, a young Japanese man, and Mary Worthington Miyasato, a Tlingit woman, in Wrangell, where she grew up on the eve of World War II. Her childhood, she said, was marked by prejudice; she was stoned while walking to school, and subjected to racist name-calling.
        “‘Dirty Indian,’ ‘dirty Jap,’ and stuff like that,” Beleal recalled. “I never did take a shower without feeling clean, from the time I was eight years old on up. The prejudice that I experienced kind of set the groundwork for me to always look out for the underdog... I tried not to take it too personally, when I had the name-calling and whatnot. I tried to learn to not take everything personally, and that’s the way I survived.”
        After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the federal government ordered that all people of Japanese ancestry in the United States, regardless of whether they were U.S. citizens, be rounded up and placed in internment camps for the duration of the war.
        Beleal was 8 years old when her father and her 16-year-old brother, George Jr.,  were taken away to internment camps, her father to Lordsburg, New Mexico, her brother to Minidoka, Idaho.
        Beleal, back in Alaska, had little understanding of why her family had been the target of discriminatory acts, or of the forces that had torn them apart.
        “My earliest recollection is from 8 years old, writing to my dad in the winter, not really knowing what happened to him because my mother didn’t tell us. Just knew he was away,” she said.
        “I knew there was World War II. I knew there was fighting against Germany and Japan and Italy, but having my dad accused of being a spy because he listened to his radio upstairs?... All I remember is running down the hill to meet him in Klawock, and throwing my arms around him when I first saw him in 1945 after the war,” she said.
        Even then, with her dad back home, Beleal gained little insight into what had happened during the war.
        Her father preferred not to talk about those years, Beleal said, hoping instead to forget about them, and he also told his son to stay silent. When historian Ronald K. Inouye attempted to interview George Sr., and visited him along with a few contemporaries, the group spoke in Japanese, Beleal said, but George declined to say anything of substance.
        Moreno believes her mother’s childhood could have broken her, but instead Beleal found the strength to carve out a life for herself, and used her experience as fuel for activism. Beleal told the Sentinel that her fierce advocacy for culturally-responsive education for Alaska Native youth stems, in part, from the fact that was denied that opportunity at their age; rather than be defeated, Beleal picked up an ANB/ANS motto, “Serve One Another,” and ran with it.
        “You can fall, and you can give in to it and crumble and be angry forever, or you can find something to rise up inside you,” Moreno said.
        Beleal attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ new Mt. Edgecumbe High School from 1947 to 1953. She married Phillip Moreno Sr. in 1954 and, in their 15 years of marriage, she had eight children. She married Ed Beleal in 1969, and moved to Anchorage, living there for 33 years before returning to Sitka in 2005, where she now lives with another daughter, Rachel.
        Passionate about education – both others’ and her own – Beleal returned to school in 1994. She received her associates degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1996 at the age of 62 and her bachelor’s degree two years later from the same university.
        “I always wanted to go to college, but I had my children pretty young,” Beleal said.
        She recalled one paper she wrote, in a Western Civilizations class, that referenced the very same Inouye book that her father had declined to be a part of.
        “I got an A plus on it,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t save the copy.”
        One of the most important things she’s learned, however, came from her experiences outside of the classroom; the discrimination she encountered from her childhood onwards taught her the power both of speech and of silence.
        “I have learned when to stay quiet, and when to say something,” she said.
        Paulette Moreno, applying the lesson passed down by her mother, added that the current separation of children at the U.S.–Mexico border echoes her family’s own historical trauma, and demands swift and vocal condemnation.
        “I think it’s really important that we stand up and we say something,” she told the Sentinel. “This has been a trigger for her, and I think it’s an important time to speak about this because, if we have the power to say something, we should say it... We are living proof, as are other families, that what is happening to a child at any age, especially a young, impressionable child, that that time may get stuck in their soul if they don’t have the right support or the right resources.”
        She added that this held particularly true for “a social injustice that has to do with the color of your skin.”
        “When you have seen the impact of trauma in your own home, on those that are closest to you, when you walk outside that door and you have a chance to say something or something or something so that perhaps it could stop trauma in its tracks... you should do something in that moment that it’s happening,” she said.
        Moreno, it should be noted, has followed in her mother’s footsteps. Beleal now has 14 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren, a sixth generation of family involvement with ANS/ANB, where Moreno is the first grand vice president of ANS.
        “What I tried to teach my children, too, was don’t ask for trouble, but don’t let anybody walk all over you either,” Beleal said. “And, Paulette won’t let anybody walk all over her... My daughters are taking leadership positions everywhere.”
        One of Moreno’s recent undertakings is helping her mother tell her story, painful as it may be to recall and relay. She hoped, she said, that remembering and sharing what happened to the Miyasato family during World War II would be part of a “healing journey” for her mother.
        “I have a very brilliant, intelligent mom, but I also have a mom that is troubled,” she said.
        One step in that journey was visiting Minidoka, where Beleal’s brother was interned. Moreno accompanied her mother to the site in Idaho as part of a 2015 pilgrimage for Japanese Americans whose families were sent to the camps during World War II.
        The camp has been preserved, first as part of the National Register of Historic Places and now as a National Historic Site, to  commemorate the internment of  9,000 Japanese Americans at the Minidoka War Relocation Center.
        “It was tremendously healing, tremendously powerful, and very frightening for her,” Moreno said. “We actually walked into those rooms, where they cooked and they slept... She walked on that ground and that earth. After 70 years, she got to see something that has troubled her mind all of this time.”
        Moreno’s description of Minidoka stirred something in her mother.
        She remembered, she told the Sentinel, the room where her 16-year-old brother had slept during those years away from home.
        “My brother George had steel bunk beds at Minidoka,” she said. “I got to see the bunkhouse, and the mess hall. My dad had many friends down in Lordsburg, New Mexico, where he was interned...But, you know, these are sort of painful memories.”
        She wanted others to know that the trauma of childhood events can have lifelong impacts, if not multi-generational ones.
        “There’s always an impact of some sort,” she said. “The thing is, it depends, too, on whether that child was prepared for what happened. I wasn’t prepared...”
        It’s been hard to piece together each part of her mother’s story, Moreno said, as the process can be disturbing for Beleal. Moreno used the JACL award application as a focal point for her mother, biting off parts of the narrative with each concrete and manageable question the nomination form required.
        The nomination was supported, too, by those who know and admire Beleal.
        Jeff Tanaka, an Alaskan writer and storyteller, is one such person touched by Beleal’s fortitude. His grandfather had been friends with Beleal’s own father since the 1920s, and the two were interned together in New Mexico, Moreno explained.
        In a letter of support for Beleal’s nomination, Tanaka wrote to the JACL committee, “Harriett’s experience is unique in that her existence and advocacy work helps connect many different groups of people from often opposing corners of society... She also holds the immigrant stories of her Japanese father and she has spent a lifetime navigating the tensions and blessings that exist between these two communities. To the people of Southeast Alaska she is a well known, friendly face – someone who has lived to see many things change. She represents and shares that knowledge with a generation of youth who are hungry to learn from the past.”
        Beleal herself, too, is hungry to learn from the past. She expressed hope that she would be able to travel to Japan, to see where her father came from.
        “My dad told my kids that when he was eight or so he lived next door to Agato, a commoner from Kagoshima, Japan, and she married the emperor Hirohito,” she said. “One of my goals is to visit the royal palace there and meet the Emperor Hirohito’s relatives.”
        For now, though, she’s readying to go to Philadelphia for the JACL awards, with Moreno and her granddaughter, Mary, by her side. Moreno, for her part, is working on a short film depicting her family’s history, and wants to remind her audience of its enduring relevance.
        “Part of the reason that we’re telling this story is her own journey, but also it’s to remind people today that this is not just politics and policy, this is human life, and the effects carry on for not only that day or that week that they’re in the news, but for generations to come,” she said. “They might think that we’re standing up for something that you’re just overreacting to, but we’re not overreacting when you know the effects of unacceptance and trauma because of the color of your skin.”
        Moreno said she and her mother will be at the rummage sale at ANB Founders Hall Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and everyone is encouraged to say hello and support Beleal on her journey. Any additional questions can be addressed to Paulette Moreno, 738-6608.