The Pope from the South Side

The Topps baseball card company produced a Pope Leo XIV card soon after he was elected.

We haven’t heard much from Pope Leo XIV, but I’m pretty sure he’ll make waves over the seven seas after he was elected by the College of Cardinals during the recent Conclave.

Hailing from Chicago and being a loyal White Sox fan, Pope Leo (nee Robert Francis Prevost) brings a down-to-earth sensibility and a deep understanding of the American psyche.

While the details of his papacy are still unfolding, there’s something familiar about a pope who knows the taste of a ballpark hot dog and the heartbreak of a blown save in the bottom of the ninth.

Thousands of people awaited Pope JP II to arrive in his Pope-Copter. It was akin to seeing Elton John being flown in for a concert. The Pope-Copter is on the horizon.

His ascension to the papacy stirred memories of another papal moment closer to home. In August 1993, Pope John Paul II came to Denver for World Youth Day. At the time, I lived in Lander, Wyoming.

On a whim, I decided to drive down to Cherry Creek State Park to witness the massive outdoor Mass. The crowd was huge, joyful, expectant, and buzzing with the energy typically reserved for rock concerts and championship games.

I parked my car and walked to the makeshift sanctuary with a guy carrying a watermelon. We spent the day together, sitting on the ground, bound by curiosity and the weight of the moment. He brought the melon, and I had a Swiss Army knife on my keychain. That became our communion before the Mass. When the Pope arrived in his Pope-Copter, it felt like he was a rock star descending from the heavens.

Ironically, that was my first and only Catholic Mass. The Pope’s message about hope, connection, and the youth’s responsibility to carry something sacred into the future reminded me that sometimes faith finds you, even if you’re not looking for it.

Now, decades later, with a Pope from our own backyard, I can’t help but wonder what kind of messages will resonate from Vatican City to Chicagoland and beyond. This papacy will have an American accent and maybe a little South Side swagger.

Pilgrimage and Proof: My Family Story at Amache

When I visited Camp Amache for the first time 20 years ago, only a brown wooden sign marked the entrance.

As I reflected on that day in the middle of a crowd with Pope JPII in 1993, I found myself thinking about the quieter, more difficult memories that shape us. In mid-May 2025, I joined hundreds of others for a different kind of gathering.

I had visited Camp Amache near Granada in southeastern Colorado twice before my third time in mid-May 2025 for the 50th annual pilgrimage to Camp Amache, one of ten Japanese American incarceration sites from World War II.

The first time I visited, about 20 years ago, the site was little more than partial foundations peeking through the prairie grass.

I watched the total eclipse in Poteau, Oklahoma, in April 2024. I stopped at Granada and Amache on my way back to Boulder.

There was no visitor center, no exhibits, and no national designation, just land and silence.

I passed through Granada for the second time after the 2024 solar eclipse in Poteau, Oklahoma. By then, Amache had become a National Historic Site, an expanded museum, and the memory of what happened there was no longer just preserved, but was being honored.

My third visit was different. Hundreds of former internees and their descendants, who had once lived behind barbed wire as children, were now returning in old age to retrace their past.

There were stories in every handshake, every photograph at the museum, and in quiet moments at the restored barracks.

For me, this visit resolved a piece of family history that had always existed somewhere between fact and legend.

Hundreds of former Amache internees and their descendants attended the pilgrimage based at Granada High School.

Although I have no direct family connection to Amache, I came this time to see the Ireichō sacred book that contains the names of every known person incarcerated in the camps.

It was touring the country and made a stop at Amache. Before I went, I called ahead to ask if the book listed my grandfather Ohashi and my Uncle George, who may have been interned in California.

It didn’t, but the researchers soon confirmed that Grandpa Ohashi had been in the Tulare Assembly Center. Surprisingly, George ended up at the Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington.

My Grandfather Ohashi and Uncle George were listed in the Ireichō book of names.

I had heard this before, but now I had documentation to support the oral history. My Auntie Elsie had negotiated with state and federal officials to get both of my relatives paroled back to Wyoming, where our family had been living.

Japanese Americans in areas such as Wyoming, technically outside the official West Coast “exclusion zones,” were not free from suspicion, racism, surveillance, and the quiet burden of being seen as the enemy by their neighbors.

Standing at Amache, surrounded by descendants and survivors, I realized that my family’s story is part of a larger mosaic. Two names in a 127,000-name book serve as proof, presence, and an overdue reminder that America’s past is where we still live, not just a place we revisit.

A different take on the Sand Creek Massacre

Southern Cheyenne storyteller Greg Lamebull retells the Sand Creek Massacre story. David Nichols trained 100 Boulder volunteers to fight at Sand Creek.

Just as the names in the Ireichō testify to lives disrupted by fear and policy, my visit to Amache reminded me of how easily official narratives can exclude entire communities, and how important it is to keep telling the full story.

That realization followed me during another stop on the same trip to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

I stood on the wind-swept plains where nearly 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people—mostly women, children, and elders—were slaughtered by U.S. troops in 1864. I listened as National Park Service rangers described not only the atrocity itself but also how settlers and military officers denounced the violence at the time. Their voices, too, are part of the story.

This visit, combined with recent shifts in federal priorities, sparked the idea for a new project. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding was cut, and grant programs now emphasize the arts and stories based on America’s Western European heritage.

The Arapaho Covered Wagon Redux was an NEA-funded project that featured the Boulder Symphony and the Northern Arapaho Eagle Society drum and singers performing a new soundtrack from a tribal perspective.

In the lead-up to the United States’ 250th anniversary, the federal government is stepping back from programs that celebrate pluralism and grassroots cultural expression.

My previously funded project, The Arapaho Covered Wagon Redux, told the story of Arapaho efforts to reclaim traditional lands in Colorado, narrated from within the tribal community and told by a new soundtrack for the 1923 silent movie, The Covered Wagon.

The recording took place at a live performance in October 2024, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, featuring the Northern Arapaho Eagle Society drum and singers and the Boulder Symphony.

I’m writing a companion book and a script for a documentary titled Beyond Fort Chambers. This project explores the Sand Creek Massacre through the perspectives of the government, settlers, soldiers, and dissenters, whose voices complicate the narrative and help us understand how conscience and complicity coexisted on the frontier.

Fort Chambers, located just outside Boulder, served as a staging ground for the Colorado volunteers who attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, but it is also a site where local resistance to the massacre quietly grew.

The project poses not the question, “Whose version is true?” but rather asks, “What do we gain when we hear them all?”

Looking Back, Moving Forward

I covered the Bolder Boulder 10K on Memorial Day, taking clips of everything but the race, including an annual mug shot with Elvis.

From a chance encounter at a papal mass to uncovering family truths at Amache, and now exploring the complex histories of Sand Creek and Fort Chambers, these stories remind us that memory isn’t passive, but instead is a future we shape, preserve, and pass to others based on our collective and diverse experiences.

At a time when public narratives are becoming narrower and the social and cultural divides are wider, it’s more important than ever to listen to voices from the margins and seek a deeper understanding of our origins and how we’ve ended up.

If these reflections resonate with you, I invite you to:

• Read my memoir, Views from Beyond Metropolis, which chronicles my personal journey through identity, place, and the evolving concept of home in the American West. How can we reimagine Superman’s American Way and become more collaborative?
• Watch the documentary, The Arapaho Covered Wagon Redux, which offers a powerful look at Arapaho efforts to reclaim land and gain historical recognition following the Sand Creek Massacre with a contemporary soundtrack blending traditional Arapaho songs with the Boulder Symphony.
• Read my memoir, Beyond Heart Mountain, which is about being Japanese in Wyoming and the history of the once vibrant Japanese neighborhood on West 17th Street in Cheyenne, my hometown. Watch the companion PBS documentary.
• Listen to my podcast, Black &Tan, which I co-host with my friend and colleague Pedro Silva. We talk about ways we can become more accepting of people different than ourselves, based on different kinds of beer.

Your engagement helps keep our stories a part of the broader American conversation.

If you’d like to stay in touch, especially those of you far away, or have moved on to different pursuits. If you’re interested, please subscribe.