Relocation American Style Kitty Costello "Relo...

Haiku for a Locked Temple

We come for last prayers,
our few possessions in hand,
find temple doors locked.

No one worships here.
Now even our gods scare them,
trapped like ghosts inside.

Keep safe this temple.
Our faith no shield from terror,
yet not abandoned.

The gods may find us
locked within prisons of shame,
our priest hauled away.

Prayer beads pass his hands,
trace the unbroken circle
Life is suffering.

If passersby ask
where we have gone tell them to--
ask the government.

Our roots are unearthed
by hands unseen, wrenched up with
clumps of dirt dangling.

Prayer is set loose.
Offerings fill the passing winds
from temples within.

Dreamers dream beyond
clack of train wheels through far lands.
Stillness in motion.

Relocation American Style

Kitty Costello

"Relocation" is the word used by the U.S. government for the roundup and imprisonment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. "Relocation." Such an innocent, harmless-sounding word. "Dislocation" at least implies something being out of joint, but "relocation" is entirely neutral, giving no hint of whether the move is by choice or by force. In another clever twist of language, the agency that oversaw the internment was called the "War Relocation Authority," as if it were the war being relocated rather than human beings.

Dorothea Lange's photographs tell a different story. Soldiers with bayonets stand guard over families. Children and elders are tagged like merchandise. A boy stares sad-eyed from the window of a departing train.

The "relocation" of the Japanese took place against a backdrop of massive "relocation" of people and resources worldwide. While in Germany the Nazis "relocated" human beings to deathcamps, here trains "relocated" munitions and soldiers to every port, east and west, on their way overseas. From the south, boxcars brought Mexican braceros to fill the labor gap the American working-class-turned-soldier left behind. Joining the war effort at home, hundreds of thousands of workers "relocated" to the Bay Area for jobs at the largest shipyards this country had ever seen. In all of California and Arizona, people of Japanese ancestry, mostly U.S. citizens, were "relocated" to ten remote internment camps as far flung as Heart Mountain, Wyoming and Jerome, Arkansas.

The largest camp, where 19,000 Japanese were interned, was at Tule Lake, California on the Modoc Plateau near the Oregon border. This is a land of sudden change. Active volcanoes last erupted 1000 years ago, forming huge flows of sharp black lava that once sizzled down to the edges of Tule Lake. Winds and storms move unimpeded over this broad high desert. Temperatures can vary as much as 80 degrees in one day, from scorching hot to freezing cold. One can watch clouds reach down in rainy streaks on far horizons. Storms are strangely silent from long distances, or they may arrive in a fast fury, dumping rain or snow unexpectedly in any season of the year.

Here the Japanese "relocatees" lived in drafty barracks set up in the model of an army camp, with little privacy, and heated only by small gas or wood stoves. They lived behind barbed wire, guarded by armed soldiers. The camp was built on a drained lakebed, and when it rained, the ground turned to mud. Adults worked but were paid some of the lowest wages in the country. Though schooling was arranged for the children, classrooms were unheated and had no textbooks or supplies. One typing class made its own typewriters by drawing circles on a sheet of paper where each letter key would be, and practiced on the paper.

The Japanese were imprisoned in this remote place for more than three years. Their stay was just one more chapter in a long, multi-layered tale of "relocation" at Tule Lake. As in most of northern California, native people and natural resources had been displaced to make way for post gold-rush settlers in the 1860's. Many of the native Modocs rebelled against "relocation," holing up in the dreaded lava beds just east of Tule Lake. There, a moonscape of sharp, black rocks cut the boots of soldiers and the hooves of cavalry horses who pursued them. Sudden blinding mists drove army battalions in maddening circles. In one of history's most dramatic and highly-publicized Indian wars, the Modocs held the cavalry off for six months until, in the end, it took an army twenty times their size to route them from the lava beds. Survivors were either hung or forced to "relocate" to Oklahoma, where so many other tribes had been "relocated" from the east. Far from their homeland, the Modocs eventually took on the culture of the Plains Indian peoples.

For millennia Tule Lake has also been the stopping place for dense, careening flocks of migrating waterfowl along the Pacific flyway -- arctic swans, snow geese, white pelicans, cinnamon teals. At any warning, great gaggles would rise from the cover of rushes and reeds, a honking, deafening clamor of precision feathered flyers, darkening the sky. Since the turn of the century, most of the water in Tule Lake has been drained for cropland. Though Tule Lake still hosts the largest concentration of migratory waterfowl in North America, their numbers have dropped at an alarming rate. So much of their habitat and food sources have been destroyed that they are now dependent upon grain grown and left for them by humans in specified wildlife management areas.

Like the birds, the Modoc people now gather here once a year at the invitation of the Park Service.

All that's left of the Japanese internment camp today are some of the administrative buildings and some fencing. At the roadside an old stone building, once an office, now a general store, stands next door to a fifties-era, broken-down hamburger stand, its lighted sign just a string of bulbs inside a broken plastic casing. Further off the road are the old guard barracks, now used as housing for migrant workers who "relocate" seasonally, following the harvest. I wonder what old ghosts emerge when they dig here in the soil, and I wonder how many, like the geese crouched in the tule reeds, must rise up at a moment's notice and flee when a car cruises by too slowly, always in fear of "relocation" when the whisper of "La Migra" rustles like a breeze down the rows of crops. Further behind the migrant worker housing, out in the drained lakebed, barely a trace remains where the barracks for the Japanese internees once stood, only the old dump full of rusted tin cans and a few shards of broken pottery.

The other internment camp in California was at Manzanar in Owens Valley between the Sierra and Inyo ranges. This is where Dorothea Lange took many of her "relocation" photos. Though opposed to the forced removal of the Japanese, she accepted a position as photographer for the War Relocation Authority, hoping to document the injustice of the camps. Her photos evoke immediate sympathy for the Japanese, showing the cramped, squalid housing conditions at the camps, the armed guards, and children with downcast eyes. Many of these photos were impounded by the Army and some were not released until years after the war had ended. Few were shown publicly until the book and exhibit Executive Order 9066 were put together after her death.

Manzanar in Owens Valley is another site of phenomenal, multilayered "relocation" of people and natural resources. Owens Valley is the ancestral home of the Paiute people and was once the site of Owens Lake, fed by Owens River. Sixty-six thousand acres were promised to the Owens Valley Paiute for a reservation in 1910, but the city of Los Angeles "bought" the land and water resources from local farmers in 1913. The lake soon disappeared as the river was diverted by a great aqueduct, carrying its water 250 miles southwest to L.A.

Ever since that time, when the winds blow across the dry lakebed, they turn into raging dust storms. The sky darkens with a near-blinding billow of dust clouds. People cough and wheeze uncontrollably. One of Lange's photos captures a dust storm blowing through the barracks at Manzanar. Two small figures run for cover, dwarfed by Mt. Manzanar looming above, and a gigantic American flag.

Now only a few building foundations and fruit orchards are left where the camp used to be, and a single stone obelisk with plaque marking the spot. This is "relocation" American style.