As I headed into Asian American Heritage Month* I told myself that that I didn’t need to read more about was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It is the one moment in Asian American history that most of us know something about. But I kept coming across interesting stuff with new perspectives. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, is one of them.

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I have no doubt that you are familiar with Dorothea Lange’s work. She was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Service Administration to document rural poverty during the Depression. The purpose of their work was to document the need for FSA programs; Lange did much more than that. She created powerful portraits of the human cost of the Depression.

What few of us knew is that in 1942, the War Relocation Authority, which had been established to organize the internment of Japanese Americans, hired Lange to document the program. They, too, got more than they expected. And unlike the FSA, the WRA wasn’t happy with what they got. Lange’s photographs are an unflinching portrait and critique of a program that she did not support. Unlike her portraits of migrant and farm workers in the Depression, her photographs of interned Japanese Americans were suppressed by the United States military during the war—the word “Impounded” written across some of the prints— and then quietly buried in the National Archives. (Can you say “erasure”?)

Impounded is divided into three parts. The first tells the story of how Lange took the photographs, placing them within the larger context of her life and work. It grapples with the question of why the photographs were commissioned at all, and the way they were buried in the records. (But not destroyed.) The second part, titled “An American Story,” tells the story of the internment. The third is a large selection of Lange’s photographs, with their original captions. A brilliant and heartbreaking indictment of one of our most shameful moments.

It turns out I was wrong: I did need to read more about the internment camps.

*I’ve given up typing out the whole thing. Realistically, I’m not going to read anything dealing with Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders this month. But I’ll keep an eye out for the future.