Descendants of two government-sanctioned atrocities gather in Colorado

GRANADA — Mitch Homma stood on the weathered concrete slab that is all that remains of the barracks where his father and his grandparents lived 80 years ago inside the barbed wire of the Granada Relocation Center, a euphemism later shortened to Camp Amache to designate one of 10 incarceration camps for Japanese Americans hastily erected in the wake of the 1942 attack on Pearl Harbor.

In one hand, Homma held an old photograph of three siblings — Hisao Homma, the young boy who’d become his father, in the middle — posing next to a scrawny sapling. With the other, he pointed to the thick, towering trunk rising just a few feet away, leafed out in the warmth of a southeastern Colorado spring.

“That,” he said, “is this tree.”

On the weekend before…