Long before World War II, the U.S. Army rounded up Native Americans onto reservations — drawing in their new boundaries. And in Arizona, the federal government once again looked to those lands for another minority population — Japanese Americans — also forcibly rounded up by the military after the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941.
A pair of Arizona reservations were seen as housing the solution.
None of the eight other U.S. War Relocation Authority internment camps sat upon tribal lands, so why here in Arizona? UCLA assistant anthropology professor Koji Lau-Ozawa has an answer.
“John Collier, who was the commissioner of Indian Affairs at the time, advocated for all of the camps to be put on reservation lands,” said Lau-Owaza. “He thought that the Office of Indian Affairs was well-suited to this task of managing these ‘confined racialized populations.’”
‘This presented an opportunity’
The “Indian New Deal,” as FDR called it, was part of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This landmark law marked a transformation, as the U.S. view of tribes evolved from wards to sovereigns.
The federal government slowly did away with policies of forced assimilation, encouraged tribes to form their own governments, and attempted to fix a fractured relationship mired in broken treaty promises.
FDR’s administration also tried making amends for past treatment by heavily investing in tribal infrastructure, like roads, bridges, irrigational canals and dams. That was, until the U.S. war effort suddenly began.
“Then, of course, with the onset of the war itself, funds were starting to dry up,” added Lau-Ozawa, who is the descendant of Japanese American internment camp survivors from his dad’s side. “This presented an opportunity.”
An opportunity to turn Japanese Americans into a source of prison labor to develop tribal resources. The effort was highlighted in a 1943 propaganda film – from the U.S. War Information Office – narrated by Dwight Eisenhower’s brother, Milton, about an internment camp in western Arizona: “At Parker, they undertook the irrigation of fertile desert lands.”
“The full story will begin to unfold when the raw lands of the desert turn green, when all adult hands are at productive work on public lands or in private employment,” continued Eisenhower. “It will be fully told only when circumstances permit the loyal American citizens once again to enjoy the freedom we in this country cherish, and when the disloyal, we hope, have left this country for good.”
Brian Niiya believes the U.S. embraced a stereotype.
“Japanese Americans, with their supposed expertise and farming and agriculture, could help build up the land that would allow for the Native Americans to benefit from,” said Niiya, editor of Densho Encyclopedia. “Without the consent of the tribes themselves, of course.”
‘We could bulldoze our way through’
And without much, if any, legal representation or political clout at that time, the Gila River Indian Community and Colorado River Indian Tribes — fledgling governments in the eyes of the U.S. — both objected to such proposals and tried fighting camp construction but failed.
The Gila River Indian Community would formally ratify its first constitution in 1936, while the Colorado River Indian Tribes followed a year later — giving their councils no more than six years to govern before the camps, and the grand unkept promises that came with them, were thrust upon their lands.
“Tribal council really didn’t have that much experience being a tribal council,” CRIT Chairwoman Amelia Flores told KJZZ. “So when the BIA and War Relocation Authority came and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna establish these camps,’ I think they were threatened, ‘Well, if we don’t do it, we’re going to take away your land.’ I think that was the intention all along.”
Flores explained that prior to that first council, their leaders came from a lineage of Mohave and Chemehuevi chiefs — all before Navajos and Hopis would join them along the Colorado River to form a confederation of four distinct tribes once World War II ended in 1945.
Those initial Navajo and Hopi families who trekked from Arizona’s North Country to the nearly 300,000-acre reservation neighboring California were promised plots of farmland and even remnants of that Japanese American internment camp, like barracks, as an incentive by the federal government to resettle.
“The Hopis and Navajos weren’t colonized here,” said Flores. “The [U.S.] saw the vast acreage of this reservation, you know, wondered ‘Well, it’s only this many Mohaves, there’s only this many Chemehuevis,’ so more or less forced into accepting the building of the three camps on our reservation.”
Niiya mentioned that this attitude was openly held throughout the Office of Indian Affairs, “just a thought that we could bulldoze our way through and take control of those lands.” Internment was also an issue for the Navajo Nation at the Old Leupp Boarding School near Winslow.
“They did pass a resolution for the use of the boarding school to help in the war effort against alien enemies,” said Davina Two Bears, a Diné archeologist. “Didn’t say anything about imprisoning Japanese American citizens.”
Named after Francis Leupp, Teddy Roosevelt’s commissioner of Indian Affairs, the school opened in 1909 and once housed 500 children before suddenly shutting down in 1942. The Interior Department turned it over to the U.S. War Relocation Authority a year later. That site was left in shambles with the military bulldozing those buildings once the isolation center closed by December 1943.
One of dozens of smaller internment facilities nationwide called isolation centers, as many as 80 Japanese Americans — previously detained at an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp near Moab in southwest Utah — were then transferred to be held captive at Leupp.
“With no due process,” added Two Bears, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, “no idea of why they were there — how long — no lawyers, of course, and it’s interesting that it’s imprisonment at a boarding school on Indigenous lands.”
‘We don’t go to war anymore with the tomahawk’
Once again, today’s federal government is butting up against tribal lands near and far.
From Arizona — where the Tohono O’odham Nation is seeing its shared southern border with Mexico turn into a heavily militarized zone with the Interior Department transferring swaths of public land under new management by the Defense Department — all the way to the Everglades.
Marines conduct barrier reinforcement operations in Yuma on Nov. 12, 2025.
The Trump administration’s “Alligator Alcatraz” is being built on land belonging to Miami-Dade County near the Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park. Those spots sheltered hiding Miccosukees in the swamps during Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal era beginning in 1830.
“We’re right in the middle of it,” Miccosukee Tribe Chairman Talbert Cypress told KJZZ. “We have members that live within 500 feet of the detention center. You know, it’s not like this distant thing that it is for a lot of Floridians in Naples or Miami.”
Upon gaining federal recognition from President John F. Kennedy in 1962 — three years following Fidel Castro’s show of tribal support by inviting a delegation of Miccosukee leaders to Cuba — the 600-member tribe that evaded the U.S. Army’s Long Walk would also try avoiding war yet again.
This time, using its political influence to protect its cultural and natural resources from development by opposing all sorts of proposed projects — both under Democratic and Republican administrations.
“Every issue nowadays gets bogged into a political war. We’ve been determined to get everybody on the same side — whether it be Republicans, Democrats, independents,” added Cypress. “Even the state recognizes such by dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars to restoration. The Everglades are part of our identity. It’s not just the place that we live. It’s a place that we use.”
“And for us, what we said was, ‘This is a step backwards.’”
Alligator Alcatraz is the latest chapter in their decades-long struggle to defend the Everglades — one prompted by a 2023 executive order from Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who invoked emergency powers addressing immigration.
“That area was pretty much seized by the state, and they fast-tracked it, without any consultation with us, without any environmental study,” said Cypress. “We weren’t contacted — we weren’t notified — we weren’t given a chance to say our piece.”
In the latest salvo, a judge from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with them and a pair of environmental plaintiffs, including the nonprofit Friends of the Everglades and the Tucson-headquartered Center for Biological Diversity, in the tribe’s last resort to stop the detention center.
That ruling cited violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, with Cypress underscoring “we don’t go to war anymore with the tomahawk or anything like that — you know, we go to courtrooms now, and we go to meetings with politicians.”
‘We’ve all lost so much’
Alligator Alcatraz is part of the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown being carried out by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Under Noem’s leadership, ICE has already detained 66,886 people nationwide this fiscal year alone. The Phoenix “Area of Responsibility,” as defined by ICE data, has the second-highest total, with 8,460 detainees, behind only Harlingen, Texas.
On Friday, Tucson became among the latest cities hit with a string of ICE raids. Masked and armored federal agents stormed Taco Giro restaurants and homes across southern Arizona, including Marana, Sierra Vista, Casa Grande and Vail — leading to 46 arrests.
ICE is a lawless agency under this Administration – operating with no transparency, no accountability, and open disregard for basic due process.
— Rep. Adelita Grijalva (@Rep_Grijalva) December 5, 2025
No family in our community should live in fear, and I will not rest until we get clear answers and accountability. pic.twitter.com/Z2mUuRxHuX
Davina Two Bears fears history could be repeating itself.
“Taking them away from all of their family and belongings,” said Two Bears, “and that’s what happened to Japanese Americans in 1943 and Indigenous people during colonization. We’ve all lost so much.”
