Ayleen Ito Lee doesn't remember anything about her time at the Minidoka Internment Camp. She was too young. But she's heard stories from her mother.

Her father didn't tell her any stories though.

"He was quite embittered by the experience and just didn't want to talk about it," Lee said.

Lee's father's mentality was to look forward, not back, when it came to the experience. Something she understood, she didn't plan on ever going back to the internment camp.

Yet at the encouragement of her husband, she found herself back at the camp in Hunt on Saturday.

"What I see underscores what I heard," Lee said.

She wasn't alone. More than 320 people made a pilgrimage to the camp from around the country this weekend. This year is the 75th anniversary of the executive order that sent Japanese-Americans to Internment Camps in the Pacific Northwest.

Her tour was lead by Nancy Nishimura, whose parents met at the Minidoka Camp.

"It makes me feel grounded, grounded in my own family history," Nishimura said.

It was her first time leading a group. Nishimura lives in Seattle and recently retired from a career of a college professor.

In addition to leading a tour, Nishimura was leading discussions and giving talks over the course of the weekend. When she told her friends about her nerves leading up to the pilgrimage they told her to treat it like a lecture in class.

"This is not another class," she said. "It's personal for me and for everyone in the audience."

At the end of her tour, Nishimura talked about how much she enjoyed hearing people's stories of the camp. After all she says, those stories are important.

"That's the real goal here, is hearing their stories and we're going to lose the elders you know, this is the 75th year, it's a matter of time we're going to lose the elders. We're doing everything we can to keep their story alive," Nishimura said.

Stories like Harriet Beleal Miyasato. She was eight in Alaska when the executive order was signed. Over night people were calling her names and even throwing rocks at her for being part Japanese and part Tlingit Native American. Eventually, her brother and father were taken away.

"My dad was a loyal American, and they thought he was a spy or an enemy because he used to listen to his radio," Miyasato said.

Her father never talked about the camps, he went to one in New Mexico. He also told Miyasato's brother not to talk about it, who was 16 when he went to Minidoka.

But Miyasato says it's important to talk about it.

"It's not in the history books, so somebody has to try to get it in the history books so the fourth and fifth graders can know the Japanese-American history from World War II," Miyasato said. "It needs to be told, and I think these pilgrimages are helping with that."

Miyasato said she's worried it can happen again. She says if people know more about what happened to Japanese-Americans then hopefully it won't happen to another ethnicity, which was a focal point of Saturday's pilgrimage.

"It's focusing on not just the Japanese-American internment experience, definitely it's the bedrock, but we're really trying to focus on the oppression of other groups," Nishimura said. "We need to advocate for the rights of other groups as well and I think that's really important."