World War II is an easy thing to teach when it's black and white. You know, U.S. was good.

The access powers were bad and good overcame evil. But in that gray, and that's where this falls, these camps fall in that gray, and that it was from the United States government, and it's obviously a black mark on on our government it's a difficult subject to

teach in high school because it does sort of not fit in with the narrative of world war two

in a lot of ways welcome to the Edge of Sports podcast.

I'm Dave Zyron.

This week we are talking to the author of a new book called The Eagles of Heart Mountain, Bradford Pearson.

This book is the true story about a group of Japanese-American teenagers who were sent to an internment camp in Wyoming during World War II and how their high school team became one of the greatest football squads in state history.

I also have some choice words about Rush Limbaugh.

Just stand up and just sit down awards, but first, let's talk to Bradford Pearson.

Brad, thanks so much for joining us here on the podcast. Thanks for having me, David. I really

appreciate it. Awesome. So first and foremost, can you tell us the story in broad strokes about

the Eagles of Heart Mountain? Sure strokes about the Eagles of Heart Mountain?

Sure.

So the Eagles of Heart Mountain is about a group of young Japanese American teenagers who get pulled from their homes across the West Coast in the spring of

1942 and sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, which was a made-up town in northwest Wyoming.

And they lived there for the next three and a half years, most of the kids.

And over those three and a half years, they came together and ended up dominating the Wyoming and Montana high school football scene for those years.

Wow. So just to be clear, so they were in an interment camp in a in a state of mass incarceration,

and yet there was a functioning high school on the camp and that high school played

white teams in Wyoming. Is that what happened? Yeah. So when when the

Heart Mountain camp opened, it immediately became the third largest city in the state of Wyoming. So

there are 11,000 people there. So any sort of community of that size, you know, it basically functioned like a small city.

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