Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/3/1/17/381492/boom_2013_3_1_17.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 shelley cannady Tule Lake Today Internment and its legacies n the surface, Tule Lake is not much to look at. Its natural scenery is austere and its two little towns, Tulelake and Newell, are forlorn and offer few O services. Yet I love the place. It is the epicenter of my family and other multiple generations of hardworking, no-nonsense farming families. Its rich fields were reclaimed for homesteading in the early twentieth century from a broad marshy lake that is still one of the most important migratory waterfowl convergences along the Pacific Flyway. There are aboriginal hieroglyphics on its volcanic bluffs. Along the lake’s former edge is the Lava Beds National Monument, with its unique geologic formations and battlegrounds from one of the United States’ final armed conflicts with Native America against the Modoc people. And there is more, much more. The unincorporated, uncharismatic Newell has fewer than 500 residents today, but less than seventy years ago its population was over 20,000. It was the site of the Tule Lake Segregation Center, our nation’s longest operating concentration camp for West Coast American citizens and legal residents of Japanese ethnicity (Nikkei), what the director of the National Park Service, Jon Jarvis, has called ‘‘...ashameful episode in our past, and a compelling lesson in the fragility of our constitutional rights.’’1 Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 3, Number 1, pps 17–33, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2013.3.2.17. BOOM | SPRING 2013 17 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/3/1/17/381492/boom_2013_3_1_17.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Many area farms have more than one repurposed building still in use. The home and all of the outbuildings on the Bettandorff farm came from the camp. Like Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley, Tule Lake the camp at Tule Lake left indelible marks on Tuleans (the was one of ten permanent ‘‘relocation’’ camps built during term for its former incarcerees) and the local community.3 World War II as a response to the hysteria that followed Until recently, Tuleans avoided being associated publicly Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the largest and most with it; as the camp where ‘disloyals’ were sent, it was a land- controversial of them all, and became the site of prominent scape of conflicted memory and singular shame. But over acts of resistance.2 The only camp with a stockade and jail, the years the meaning of internment has shifted, and the Tule Lake had more guard towers and military police than Nikkei community no longer accepts the brand of ‘disloyal’ any other, and at one point deployed eight tanks to maintain that was seared into their psyches.4 Many have since order. The war ended over six decades ago, the camps were returned with younger family members during pilgrimage decommissioned, official apologies and reparations have events. Further, the National Park Service (NPS) has begun been made, and few people are left who were directly planning for the site’s future as a National Historic Site. involved with this event. Yet Tule Lake matters. Issues of ownership, budget, and local ambivalence present Although it never enjoyed the celebrity of Manzanar, challenges to its preservation and interpretation; and while which has been the subject of books, films, and exhibitions, controversy continues, touchstones visited by pilgrims are As the camp where ‘disloyals’ were sent, it was a landscape of conflicted memory and singular shame. 18 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, on the basis of race, people of Japanese ancestry could not become naturalized citizens. deteriorating and many may become less accessible in the for pilgrimages to the site. My research has also included future. on-site visual inventories, photography and geolocation of Ironically, as Nikkei come to terms with Tule Lake, in the relocated buildings, literature and archival reviews, and local community its physical remains continue to mark an examination of crime and property value data for Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/3/1/17/381492/boom_2013_3_1_17.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 social divisions.5 It has more remaining historic assets in Newell. I’ve travelled to the sites of five of the other situ than all the other camps combined and many more of its camps to visually compare their remains and the degree assets are scattered throughout the basin.6 Its infrastructure of memorialization or historical interpretation present. and building stock have facilitated local community devel- These were Manzanar; Poston and Gila River in Arizona; opment since the war, but its intact portions, where people Topaz, Utah; and Minidoka, Idaho.7 Finally, I joined the live behind the barbed wire fences built in 1942 to exclude latest organized pilgrimage event to the Tule Lake site in Americans from other Americans based on race, have inher- July, 2012. ited the legacy of shame: in the 1970s, school children who lived there were embarrassed by its shabbiness. These days, Context: history and place it is not just shabby, it has a negative reputation. In local parlance, it’s ‘‘the ’hood,’’ a dicey place to live. A broad sweep of American history shows Japanese Amer- My family lived within view of the Tule Lake relocation ican incarceration as part of a continuum of values and camp site in a home that, like many, was made from policies that undermine civil or human rights for targeted a moved and remodeled barracks building. For nearly groups of Americans. Prior to WW II, anti-Asian, and par- four decades I’ve witnessed the layers of narrative in the ticularly anti-Japanese sentiment was high in the western landscape and the varied attitudes to the ‘‘old Jap camp’’ (a United States. Beginning in 1893 we see a history of insti- term now offensively racist) held by local residents. I tutionalized segregation, targeted immigration laws, and learned that repurposed homes like ours supported other anti-Japanese activities. Prominent social and political a post-war wave of homesteading for hardworking, white leaders in the region mainstreamed racist attitudes with American veterans, and have been the living and working inflammatory public statements like this one from V.S. environments of generations of area residents to follow. McClatchy, the publisher of the Sacramento Bee: ‘‘Of all I noticed that pilgrimages to the site by Japanese Americans races ...the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most draw larger numbers even as time grows distant from the dangerous to this country.’’8 Japanese American success in incarceration event. farming and horticulture was seen as particularly threaten- I wanted to flesh out the nuances of Tule Lake’s story, ing, resulting in the enactment of laws in 1913 and 1920 to understand how the mass incarceration event still holds preventing resident aliens from owning or even leasing power over its current and past residents. To this end I’ve land. In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, on the looked at the events, policies, and values that led to its exis- basis of race, people of Japanese ancestry could not become tence, its (d)evolving physical presence in the landscape naturalized citizens.9 since 1946, its significance to its resident (local) commu- Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, racist nity, and the imprint of place on its resonant (Nikkei) com- attitudes escalated sharply. Shortly thereafter, federal munity. I’ve been able to draw from family and community authorities arrested Japanese and Japanese American lan- knowledge, and also from communication with NPS per- guage teachers, newspaper editors, priests and other com- sonnel and the Tule Lake Committee, the organizing body munity leaders, often without informing their families BOOM | SPRING 2013 19 Its high elevation, rugged geology, cold temperatures, isolation, and the poor condition of its secondary roads made it ideal for the containment of large numbers of people. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/3/1/17/381492/boom_2013_3_1_17.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 where they were being held.10 Secretary of War Henry L. conducive to the Relocation Authority’s objectives: the for- Stimson asserted that the ‘‘racial characteristics’’ of the Jap- merlakebedhaslittletopographicalreliefandissur- anese were ‘‘such that we cannot understand or trust even rounded by volcanic bluffs, and its arid climate supports the citizen Japanese.’’11 On Feb. 19, 1942, President Roose- a native plant palette devoid of dense or tall vegetation, velt signed Executive Order No. 9066, giving the U.S. West- providing excellent distance visibility and little cover. Its ern Defense Command the authority to relocate and confine high elevation, rugged geology, cold temperatures, isolation, Japanese Americans and resident aliens from the Western and the poor condition of its secondary roads made it ideal Exclusion Area without due process.12 for the containment of large numbers of people, more than The War Relocation Authority (WRA) registered heads of any other camp. households at local registration stations and then moved Tule Lake’s secured portion was approximately one and families to Assembly Centers for one to four months prior a half square miles (1100 acres), with an additional 3575 to permanent camp assignment. The permanent camps, acres for agricultural crops and livestock, warehouses, sew- officially called ‘War Relocation Centers,’ were constructed age treatment plants and effluent fields, a garbage dump in isolated areas far from military facilities, with sufficient site, and other peripheral uses.