Arizona tribal reservations were home to two of the nation’s 10 internment camps run by the U.S. War Relocation Authority amid World War II. On the western edge of the Grand Canyon State, the Colorado River Indian Tribes – or CRIT – regularly welcomes visitors to see and help repair relics from that dark past.
In fact, there’s even an annual pilgrimage.
A warm welcome
Hundreds showed up for this year’s pilgrimage in late October, which began with a ceremony to honor those who died at the internment camp known as the Colorado River Relocation Center – more commonly called Poston.
It took nearly two minutes to shout out the 300 or so names of victims.
With bird dances and songs, tribal youth groups greeted guests before they boarded a fleet of tour buses en route to see where 17,814 Japanese Americans were held against their will less than 20 miles south of Parker.
Poston’s peak population was the third-biggest in Arizona – behind only Phoenix and Tucson. But today, it’s just an unincorporated community, surrounded by bales of hay and alfalfa stacked high on fertile fields bordering California.
‘What if we never get out?’
The 71,000-acre site was the largest of the country’s war relocation centers.
Poston contained three camps — nicknamed Roastin’, Toastin’ and Dustin’ — by residents who endured extreme weather. There were scorching-hot and humid summer days surpassing 120 degrees, with frigid winter nights dipping below freezing temperatures.
This Japanese American internment camp was named after Charles Debrille Poston, who some consider the “father of Arizona.” He served as the then-territory’s first congressional delegate after being elected in 1864.
Arizona obtained statehood in 1912.
Poston was also the Arizona territory’s first superintendent of Indian Affairs – the very same office that would later view Japanese Americans as a labor pool to develop tribal resources and infrastructure, such as roads and canals.
“I don’t remember them talking about agriculture so much, but farmers gotta farm, and I know that there was a tofu factory here,” said Janice Munemitsu, a farmer’s daughter from Orange County, California. “So that means they also had a soybean growing operation, because gotta have soybeans to make tofu, right?”
Her parents and eight other relatives were imprisoned in Poston. And their way to endure, like thousands of other internee families alongside them, was by literally building a new life for themselves.
They were assembling their own makeshift society within their chain-link bordered world that included a library, performance theater, schools and an auditorium. They also constructed places of worship, swimming pools and garden ponds to fill with carp they fished and ate – repurposing the leftovers as crop fertilizer.
Internees even published their own newspaper, the Poston Chronicle, which covered current events around the camp.
“They really set out to say, ‘Well, what if we’re here for a really, really long time? What if we never get out?’” added Munemitsu. “That’s a very high Japanese value of gaman, is we’re going to persevere and to be survivors – not victims of it.”
‘We’re much more the same than we are different’
And by 1945, the Second World War would come to an end and the prisoners were freed to start life all over again – this time, beyond the barbed-wire fence. Now, Munemitsu, who has been to Poston three times, thanks CRIT for letting them return.
“We’re much more the same than we are different,” Munemitsu mentioned. “You have to remember the history of this land and its people. And in this case, it’s not just Native Americans.”
As her tribe’s former librarian and archivist, CRIT Chairwoman Amelia Flores found their shared past a deeply important story to retell – not only for community members but the outside world.
This idea for having the tradition for an annual pilgrimage originated when Flores crossed paths with camp survivor Marlene Shigekawa, who was born inside Poston in 1944.
Their initial interaction stemmed from “Blue Jay in the Desert,” a children’s book Shigekawa wrote about the camp and came to read at the tribe’s library. Since then, her nonprofit, Poston Community Alliance, emerged and organized the pilgrimage with support from the CRIT tribal council.
The 81-year-old Shigekawa remembers her post-war generation growing up with a lot of pressure to assimilate and achieve economic success. “But in the process,” she said, “I felt that we were forced to hide our Japanese side.”
For Shigekawa, this pilgrimage has been a therapeutic outlet – one offering “spiritual strength” to reclaim their identities as Japanese Americans but also a moment for introspection “to look at who we are, what we stand for and how we can help groups that are oppressed.”
It’s something echoed by fellow camp survivor Bob Shintaku, 82, who also sits on the nonprofit’s board. He was imprisoned at Poston as an infant and has made a point to partake in this pilgrimage more than half a dozen times.
“Preserving this history is very important. That’s not an ego thing,” said Shintaku, who now lives in Fresno. “With some administrations, it’s likely this could happen again, and we don’t want that.”
‘We would love to restore everything’
And one way to remember is by rebuilding – with CRIT entrusting the care of crumbling buildings to the nonprofit behind the pilgrimage. Barbara Darden is a preservation architect from Aurora, Colorado.
“It’s not Poston Community Alliance. It’s not anybody that we work for. The building is our client,” Darden said. “We’re all very passionate about bringing a building back to life, because it tells the story.”
She’s been coming back to restore Poston piece by piece since 2009, turning that abandoned camp into a working construction zone – this time, along with Andrew Phillips, owner of a Durango, Colorado, company called Natural Dwelling.
“They’re having a good time, and it’s fun to see them connecting with their parents and their grandparents,” added Phillips. “The same mud, the same walls, the same exact material being reworked a second time around.”
That earthen material Phillips is talking about is adobe.
And on this Saturday afternoon, camp survivors and their descendants are repairing a classroom wall – one that internees originally made by hand – from clay and mud. How internees got it there in the first place remains a mystery.
“My first guess is they were able to find these little pockets of windblown clay in the foothills here,” Phillips shared. “They used the few scant resources they had, made great brick and their workmanship and their mix design and how they laid it and stacked it and built it, is all top drawer.”
For the restoration, new slabs were hauled out from a Phoenix brickyard to replace that broken wall, but the old material isn’t going to waste. It’s being blended into new mortar that’ll fill in the cracks, using a mixer much like one the U.S. Army gifted to internees more than eight decades ago.
Poston was also home to an adobe factory.
No matter which generation, Phillips reiterated a key takeaway: “This is not easy, light work.” In fact, it’s the opposite – heavy, hard work. It’s work that CRIT member Adrian Antone Jr. is lending a hand with, helping to fix vandalized structures.
“I thought it was pretty disrespectful,” said Antone. “And so finally, [I’m] giving my part to help out, especially build this little wall. It means a lot because I’m learning, you know, it’s a lot of hard work.”
Darden has dreamt of rebuilding a lot more, but that comes with a big price tag.
That high cost has been defrayed by National Park Service grants to preserve interment sites like this one. But now, the Trump administration is eradicating signs marking the camps and other so-called “disparaging” reminders of the country’s history – actions being documented by the crowdsourced Save Our Signs collaboration.
“This really set off alarm bells. Does this mean we can’t tell stories about American history that include things in our past that are painful and traumatic?” asked Molly Blake, a Save Our Signs co-founder. “How can we grow as a nation if we can’t look at those more painful episodes and ask ourselves, ‘How do we want to act moving forward?’”
When asked, the Interior Department did not respond to requests from KJZZ about whether its agency will continue distributing federal funding through the Japanese American Confinement Sites grants program.
“We would love to restore everything,” said Darden. “We do not anticipate any more grants – being more realistic, we’re looking at maybe four buildings here, and then the others we’ll just have to let them go and watch them fall into ruin.”
Either way, CRIT will continue working with the Poston Community Alliance to protect this history – one brick at a time. For now, Poston camp survivor Shigekawa remains hopeful they’ll keep such remnants of this past intact.
“Based on our two cultures, there’s a spiritual connection in terms of feeling a part of nature, respecting the land and all those who inhabit it, so I think that strengthens our link, and I believe in the power of story,” said Shigekawa. “Whatever is going on in the outside world, how negative and destructive it is, we just keep going as we always have and it’s all you can do.”
