Japanese | Zero Carbon Travel

Despite not being on the West Coast, the US military evicted all American citizens from the southern part of Arizona during WWII as potential ‘navy base saboteurs’, if they had Japanese ancestry. The military’s arbitrary exclusion zone ran through Phoenix, so if you lived on the south side of the city, you wound up incarcerated while your family on the north side kept their homes.

Like Poston, most Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes in Southern California. The barracks in the background of the photo above comprised a small part of camp 2 or Butte Camp at Gila. The Gila River Tribal Community protested, but the military appropriated over 17,000 acres of their land anyway and concentrated roughly 15,000 people here according to their ethnicity.

The tribal community had been struggling since the Gila River was diverted by white settlers beginning in the 1880s. In 1934, archaeologists dug up their ancestral burial grounds, and after they dug again in 1964, the government also created a national park site. Now that site is closed and the tribes don’t allow visitors there.

Survivors of internment built a monument on the ‘internment camp’ site, but someone shot it up with a machine gun a few years back, and unless you’re family, you can’t visit the site now. Given all the tragedies and harm done here under the American flag, seems like folks might benefit from a government funded educational center explaining the history and the importance of respecting Constitutional rights.

The Gila River Tribal Community runs the excellent nearby Huhugam Culture Center free museum, which contains a small display case of ‘relocation center’ artifacts, including two busts of young prisoners. The one pictured is Sayoko ‘Jean’ Kawamura, and the other has no name, forgotten to history.

In Arizona, across the Colorado River from California, there’s a desert hamlet called Poston in an area governed by the Colorado River Indian Tribes. Spanish Missionaries visited in 1775 and their King recognized tribal sovereignty. Mexico lost the whole territory after the War, and the US government established reservations to ‘protect’ the Mohave, Chemehuevi and others here. Today, despite some irrigation improvements, much of the population is poor, and each winter many RVers spend months living cheaply in the desert nearby.

But from 1942 to 1945, the US concentrated as many as 17,000 US citizens of Japanese ancestry forcibly relocated from their homes on the west coast to three camps, known as Roastin’, Toastin’ and Dustin’. The highs are over 105° all summer long. Besides the 50 year memorial (pictured above) to the families, children and highly decorated WWII veterans once incarcerated here, there’s not much left to see, except a few origami cranes left by visitors.

But there’s much to think about. Constitutional rights and freedoms, so cherished in this country, are an ‘all or nothing’ deal. For you to enjoy a right or freedom, you must recognize that same right belongs to all your fellow citizens, regardless of their background or beliefs. Our legal system depends on the idea that the law applies equally to everyone, that no one man is above the law and that there are no permanent classes of people entitled to extra privileges. If we want to continue to enjoy our own full rights as citizens, we must make sure that no other US citizens are trammeled, as they were here, ever again.