When U.S. put a Japanese internment camp on Gila River reservation, 2 groups found common ground

During World War II, when Japanese Americans were relocated to internment camps, some of them came to Arizona — to another place where the U.S. government had “relocated” a group of people: the Gila River Indian Reservation.

They both farmed the land, played each other in basketball and lived in confinement side by side.

It’s the topic of a new paper in the Journal of Arizona History titled “Desert Convergences.” The Show spoke with its author, Mary Ludwig, about the decision to put the internment camp there in the first place.

Full conversation

MARY LUDWIG: Part of this came from the idea of John Collier, who was the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he made the argument that the Indian office was uniquely situated to Americanize Japanese Americans because they had done such a great job with Indigenous peoples over the years.

And so he thought that it was an opportunity for Indian reservations to host these Japanese American camps, and that the Japanese could then labor on the reservations and contribute to building the infrastructure for Indigenous nations.

And this brilliant idea came without the consent of the Indigenous nations where he suggested the camps be located, and essentially the government decided to move forward regardless of them disapproving of moving these camps onto their communities.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I wanted to ask you about that because it's not like the Gila River Indian Community volunteered, right, their land for this.

LUDWIG: Not at all.

GILGER: What was the reaction from tribal members at the time?

Leif Van Cise

LUDWIG: Well, at Gila River, they tried not to act, so they voted against allowing the Japanese internment camp to be placed on their reservation. And then refused to give their assent to it for months. And it was not until after the U.S. government had moved forward with building the camp, regardless of their disapproval, that they finally voted with only a one-vote margin to accept the camp being there.

And this was all the way in October, even though they had begun to bring Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants into that camp that summer. So they had been living there for months by the time the tribe actually, you know, I think they just saw this as inevitable.

GILGER: Right. it's so interesting because you're reminding us that this sort of pits these two communities against one another, but that they also kind of echoed similar histories. There's a quote that you begin with here from a Japanese man named Charles Kikuchi, who was sent to the camp on the Gila River Indian Community, and it kind of gets at some of these parallels. Can you read that for us?

LUDWIG: Absolutely. Kikuchi would state that “This is not such a novel experiment in our history after all. These relocation centers are glorified Indian reservations. At least the treatment will be more humane and the vision wider than the way they drove the Indians westward into reservations.”

GILGER: So there are these kind of surprising parallels between the histories here, but it also seems like there are some surprising parallels between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and Japanese Americans, including, you know, there were violations of land and property and rights, but use of schools to kind of culturally assimilate these kids, Americanize both populations of kids. Cheap labor, that was exploited at the time.

What kind of unexpected connections did you find in researching this history?

LUDWIG: Well, I think the unexpected connection was that rather than demonizing Japanese Americans, as so many Americans did at the time, even though both at Gila River — and actually at Colorado River as well — even though both Indigenous nations pushed back and tried to prevent the camps from being located there, once they were, the connections that did occur — and they were somewhat limited — they resulted in recognitions of humanity.

For instance, some of the Japanese Americans at Gila River sometimes were able to engage in essentially black-market trade for chickens and vegetables and stuff like this that were not being provided for them. And you see this kind of recognition of one's humanity. I have to believe this existed as well with the different basketball teams, one from the internment camp and one from the Indian reservation actually playing each other.

GILGER: Right, well, it's two kinds of marginalized peoples kind of coming together even though they did not, either of them, choose to be there.

LUDWIG: Correct.

GILGER: So there are all of these kind of unexpected ties, the humanity you point out. I wonder, as you're researching this, what did you take away from learning about this history? What were some of the maybe lessons learned or maybe lessons we have yet to learn or need to learn again in this country?

LUDWIG: Well, I think the biggest lesson was that Japanese American incarceration during World War II was not unique, that we had confined people previously, that we had associated them with group guilt, with many Indigenous peoples in order to justify placing them on reservations, there was a characterization as vagrants, as criminal, as savage, and this justified their confinement. And of course fear justified their confinement as well.

And we see this again with Japanese American internment during World War II, and I fear that we see this again today with what we are doing with our immigrant community that is being characterized as a criminal element in our society, despite the statistics that speak against that characterization.