The day before we headed out to Sand Creek, we visited a
Japanese-American concentration camp near the massacre site. It was one of
eight such camps during WWII. Here we saw a dominant white population willing
to use its power to remove those who did not look like them and did not share
their culture from their residences, businesses and farms and place them in
sites far removed from their homes. It was the same pattern we saw in the
Plains as first the bison and then the indigenous people were removed from the
lands that gave their lives meaning.
There is a common presumption among the dominant group of an
entitlement to dispose of other people and their properties, to disregard the
impacts of the dominant culture’s activities on their lives and to do so with
impunity. The Doctrine of Discovery has long tentacles that reach through the
centuries to the present day.
Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - American Concentration Camp
Concentration camp and American are not concepts we Americans
often mention in conjunction with one another. But in the early heat of WWII, a
racist “yellow peril” gripped the Pacific Coast in the wake of the Japanese
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. An executive order by President Franklin
Roosevelt at the request of California Governor (and future U.S. Supreme Court
Chief Justice) Earl Warren would result in the round up of 120,000 Japanese
descent residents, more than two-thirds of them U.S. citizens. They would be
placed in 10 camps strung out across the western U.S. One of them was Amache,
near Granada, Colorado, which housed 10,000 inmates.
Called relocation camps by those wishing to avoid the
implications of the actual prison conditions of these camps, scholars and
Japanese survivors would rightly call them America’s concentration camps,
literally sites where non-combatants are imprisoned during a time of war.
President Roosevelt regularly referred to the camps as concentration camps.
These were not death camps like those operated by America’s Nazi foes
conducting a Holocaust, but they were more than relocation camps which fails to
reflect the fact that these Japanese Americans were removed from their homes
and forced to live under surveillance by armed guards. They also were not
internment camps which points toward the imprisonment of enemy combatants.
The Japanese heritage residents made the best of it, growing
sugar beets, creating artwork and traditional silken clothing. The school built
there over the objections of resentful local residents’ would field high school
sports teams and sponsor festivals. Most would survive their three year
imprisonment. But they would return to homes and businesses confiscated by
strangers, their rich pre-war lives now only a memory.
In 1980, Congress created a commission to study impacts on
Japanese citizens and in 1988 a series of bills providing financial reparations
began to be approved. But how can money ever buy back three years of life?
For three years the 10,000 incarcerated residents of the
Amache camp would seek to live as normal a life as possible under difficult
conditions. We see that in the artistic depictions of camp life created by
internees and artifacts later donated to the Amache museum by its former
residents.
But life in Amache was always cramped, confined. There were
always limits to whatever privileges camp life might provide. And the ever
present guard tower never let those within the barbed wire enclosures forget
their ultimate reality.
Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - Gifts to Their Captors
In 1943, a racially segregated regimental combat team
composed of Japanese Nisei men and women, second generation American citizens,
would leave their families behind in concentration camps like Amache to serve
in the war efforts of the same U.S. government that held their families
captors. That team would include 953 men and women from Amache who would serve
in infantry, military intelligence, the Women’s Army Corps and the Nursing
Corps.
At the far western end of the Amache site is a cemetery
where those who died while in captivity there were buried. While many of the
remains would be moved to sites from which the internees had come after the
war, nine still remain today. Amidst the headstones and small ornamental
pagodas, a grey granite memorial stands to the 31 Amache soldiers who gave
their lives to save the very same country who held their families captive,
their survivors mourning then in funeral rites behind the barbed wire of Amache.
The list of names includes Kiyoshi K. Muranaga who received the Medal of Honor
for his courage and self sacrifice. Pilgrims to this site continue to leave
origami peace cranes at the foot of this monument to pay their respects.
In perhaps one of the greatest ironies, a Nisei unit would
be among those who helped liberate the Nazi death camp at Dachau. The
concentration camps that held their families back home were never death camps.
But they evidenced the same pattern of fear driven prejudice that drove
dominant groups within their respective countries to dehumanize designated
scapegoats onto whom the collective Shadow of that dominant group could be
projected.
Every year, Amache veterans and their descendants gather at
Amache to remember the gifts of these captives to their captors. An American
flag signed by these veterans is on display at the Amache museum.
Pilgrimage II, Day 4 - Amache: Owning Our Shadow
Within months of the end of WWII, the Amache concentration
camp would be dismantled. Some structures would be relocated for reuse but most
were simply razed. Clearly, America had other things on its mind when the
fighting in the Pacific ended, not the least of which was rebuilding the lands
of former foes devastated by American firepower. But it’s hard not to imagine
that this expeditious sealing off of the memory of this dark chapter in
American history was motivated at least in part by a need of the victors to
repress this piece of its collective Shadow.
Even the best of ends never justifies the use of any means,
particularly when the sacrifice of human beings and human dignity are the means
utilized.
In the Granada museum created by community volunteers and
surviving Amache internees and their descendants, a speech by Franklin
Roosevelt justifying the creation of Nisei military units is displayed. In it,
the President said:
“No loyal citizen should be denied the democratic right to
exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship regardless of his ancestry.
The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been
governed is a matter of the mind and heart. Americanism is not and never was a
matter of race or ancestry.”
Noble ideals indeed. But Amache reveals a very different
reality. The truth is, the Japanese Relocation Act embodied an undeniable
racism. America was at war with an Axis composed of Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italy in addition to Hirohito’s Japan. No German or Italian
immigrants or their descendants were rounded up and incarcerated during the
war. Only Japanese heritage people were targeted. Of the three Axis powers,
whose descendants’ loyalty could have been doubted, only those who were
racially identifiable were targeted.
Amache is a little known chapter of our history. But its
volunteer run museum, staffed by the National Park service, and the podcast
self tour of the Amache site - where the recreational hall and a barracks have
recently been relocated and reconstructed - offer those willing to descend into
America’s collective Shadow a chance to own all of who we are as Americans.
That process of acknowledging our dark past, owning our collective Shadow and
balancing it against the bright, white persona of American ideals is critical
to a country whose need to become conscious in this time of crisis is pressing.
We are in the debt of those dedicated volunteers at Granada
and a National Park Service which provides opportunities to hear all of our
collective story unfiltered (and whose very existence is now in jeopardy
because of that) for their essential roles in that desperately needed journey
to consciousness. The first step in any process of redemption and repairing of
the breach is to foster truth telling and being willing to listen to those
stories even as the unsettle us. Particularly when they unsettle us.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely
an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected
don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and
to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? - Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to
complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami
Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2025
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