'Fences' exhibit explores barriers

Sometimes a fence is just decorative, a row of cheery white pickets behind a bed of petunias. More often, a fence is a way to say, "This is me. That's you. Keep out."

America's fences — barbed wire and wrought iron, chain link and glaringly white vinyl — are part of our physical and psychological landscape, a way to chronicle our history and our relationships, a glimpse into who we view as the enemy.

They're more than just functional objects, argues a traveling Smithsonian exhibit called "Between Fences," which opens today at the Heritage Museum of Layton, courtesy of the Utah Humanities Council. Although the exhibit was first presented in Washington, D.C., 10 years ago, it is especially timely now as Americans debate whether to erect a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Steve Koga of West Haven often thinks about another fence from another time, one that he will recall at Saturday's exhibit opening. In 1943, Koga's mother and family were corralled inside the barbed wire fence at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah's western desert. Like the other 8,300 West Coast Japanese-Americans held there during World War II, Sumiko was considered the dangerous "other."

At the same time, Koga's father lived as a Utah Japanese-American outside the fence and was allowed in and out of the camp to deliver produce from his farm. Koga isn't sure of the details of his parents' story — the second-generation Japanese-Americans in the camp rarely talked much about the ordeal, he says — but he does know that somehow his father, then 25, was introduced to his mother, then 26. Their intermittent courtship took place inside the confines of the barbed wire.

So, the complex nature of fences resonates with Koga, a farmer who can recognize the need to protect crops from predators. We have fences, he says, for the same reasons we have separate rooms in our houses: for privacy, to secure our own property, to set boundaries.

The whole notion of personal property is pretty much a 13th century European invention, says Kathryn MacKay, associate professor of history at Weber State University and "state scholar" for the exhibit. The concept that humans have a right to own land, and to therefore fence it off from others, was foreign to the American Indians that Europeans eventually encountered.