(This takes approximately three minutes to read.)
Quoting Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, ch. 11:
Japanese internment during World War II is one of the most regretted episodes in U.S. history. In May 1942 some 112,000 residents of western states, some Japanese nationals and some U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, were forcibly removed from their homes and held in camps for years. In 1988 Congress apologized for the “fundamental injustice” of this and awarded each internee $20,000—a rare instance of the government paying reparations.
Yet internment is one of those episodes that appear different once you look beyond the logo map. It was in the territories that the government’s willingness to violate the civil liberties of its own subjects was on the fullest display. Hawai‘i offers one example—a quasi-internment that, instead of targeting a racial group, turned an entire territory into a barbed-wire-encased armed camp, with the military monitoring the movement, communications, and political activity of every inhabitant.
Less familiar is what happened in the Aleutians, the chain of Alaskan islands that stretches toward Asia. Before the war started, Gruening and his colleagues had discussed the possibility of [an Axis] attack. Should the islands be evacuated, just in case? Gruening was against it: to remove the Aleuts from their homes, he believed, would be disastrous.
The [Axis] invasion forced the issue. The Alaska Command ordered that all Natives living on the Aleutians west of Unimak and on the nearby Pribilof Islands be removed and sent farther inland. This wasn’t from fear of disloyalty. It was, rather, a “for your own good” internment, a way to keep civilians out of a war zone (though Aleuts noticed that the white residents of Unalaska Island were allowed to stay).
Because Gruening and his colleagues had resisted the notion of Aleut internment, there were no plans in place. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships (“while eating breakfast,” an officer on Atka recalled—“the eggs were still on the table”) and dropped off in unfamiliar Southeast Alaska.
They found this new environment unsettling. By all accounts, the large stands of trees unnerved them. “Feels funny,” the chief of the Atka tribe noted with alarm. “No room to walk.”
The trees, though, were the least of the Aleuts’ problems. Their new “homes” were whatever spaces the navy could find on short notice: abandoned mining camps, fish canneries, and labor camps. Many lacked running water. And despite the millions the military was pouring into the Alaska Highway, it never found the money to fix the internment camps.
So what were the camps like? “I have no language at my command which can adequately describe what I saw,” wrote Alaska’s attorney general to Gruening after he toured one. “If I had I am confident you would not believe my statements.”
A desperate internee tried to draw a picture for officials. The camp was “no place for a living creature,” she explained in a letter. “We drink impure water and then get sick the children’s get skin disease even the grown ups are sick from the cold. We ate from the mess house and it is near the toilet only a few yards away. We eat the filth that is flying around. We got no place to take a bath and no place to wash our clothes or dry them when it rains.”
Gruening visited, accompanied by a doctor. The complaints were accurate. “As we entered the first bunkhouse the odor of human excreta and waste was so pungent that I could hardly make the grade,” the doctor recorded. The buildings had no lights, nonfunctioning sewage, and water that was “discolored, contaminated and unattractive.”
Despite being loyal citizens who had surrendered their homes at the navy’s request, the Aleuts languished in these camps. Though no barbed wire surrounded them, leaving was impossible: the Aleuts needed military permission and (in most camps) a boat to leave, neither of which was forthcoming.
So they stayed, for years. After [the Axis] had been rousted from the Aleutians and the tides of war had turned, there was little likelihood that the islands would face continued peril. At least, the government was comfortable taking the men of the Pribilof Islands back to their homes to work the 1943 seal harvest (the Fish and Wildlife Service had a lucrative deal with a fur company). But once the Pribilovians turned over the furs, they were sent straight back to the camps.
The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were—far away—than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.
The delay mattered, though. Sickness in the camps—the predictable result of a near-total lack of infrastructure—turned to death. In the West Coast camps, the death rate of internees was no greater than that of normal civilians. But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had died.