THE CRISIS IN COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION: AMERICAN INDIANS & JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION

Abstract

On March 24, 1943, Acting Secretary of the Department of the Interior, Abraham “Abe” Fortas, and Director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), Dillon Myer, agreed to repurpose a former Indian boarding school into the primary prison for camps that incarcerated over a hundred thousand individuals “of Japanese ancestry” during World War II.  Built in 1909 on the homelands of the Navajo Nation and only recently closed to students, the Leupp Training School offered the WRA a foundation upon which to construct a prison for the “aggravated troublemakers” in the ten concentration camps.  These “aggravated troublemakers” were largely dissidents—individuals who challenged their detention and forced loyalty oaths through collective action like strikes and other uprisings; these individuals were imprisoned at Leupp without charges or trial, and some were transported to the prison in “coffin-like” four-foot-by-six-foot wooden boxes with a single air hole that only narrowly prevented suffocation during the thirteen-hour trip.

 

Located 30 miles away from its nearest town of Winslow, Arizona (population ca. 4,500), the Leupp Isolation Center imprisoned approximately 80 of the circa 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans detained by the United States —seemingly yet another drop of injustice in a wave of “morally repugnant” policy.  But the Leupp Isolation Center provides a particularly paradigmatic example of the central role of American colonialism in facilitating Japanese incarceration.  Few scholars to date have drawn connections between American colonialism, Native nations, and Japanese American incarceration.  Even fewer scholars have unearthed the direct, enduring, and broad relationship between the federal government’s efforts to colonize Native people and its efforts to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry.  Early plans envisioned building all of the Japanese American “relocation centers” on Indian reservations, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, campaigned to head the project he described as “colonization of the Japanese,” including the administration of all camps he termed “colonies.”  Disputes over how much self-determination to foster at the camps disrupted those initial plans, however, and the agency created to oversee Japanese American incarceration, the War Relocation Authority, cobbled together seasoned colonial administrators from the Indian Service and another, more top-down, colonial administration agency, the Soil Conservation Service.    

 

This Essay explores how the administrative agencies and actors who built and maintained American colonial projects across Indian Country turned these same tools toward the detention and incarceration of individuals with Japanese ancestry.  This history is necessarily one of administration—it finds continuities between federal administrative institutions, their officials, and the legal justifications they offered (or did not) in accomplishing their aims.  Disputes between administrative officials over how best to colonize Indian Country spilled over into disputes over how best to incarcerate Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals.  These disputes, in turn, then impacted federal policy for Indian Country as these officials returned to the Indian Service following closure of the concentration camps.  This history is a legal history of American colonialism writ large.  It reveals the ways that the American colonial project was not tethered to particular populations (Indians) or contexts (Indian Country) but was instead an effort to build infrastructure—legal, constitutional, technological, bureaucratic—to govern a range of populations.     

Keywords: legal history, constitutional history, federal indian law, Japanese internment, Korematsu, American colonialism