Most Americans are aware of what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That tragic act that killed over 2400 soldiers and wounded 1200 more, would bring America into WWII. Just 10 weeks later President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would sign an executive order that would incarcerate people of Japanese descent, under suspicion as enemies, confining them to several internment camps across the country. One of those prison camps was right here in North Dakota. Special Contributor Alicia Hegland Thorpe tells us about a memorial to acknowledge what happened at that site.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
Over 125,000 Japanese-American men, women, and children were subjected to years of unjust confinement in prison camps across the United States during World War II. President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 moved this targeted group through 15 assembly centers and into 10 confinement sites, also known as concentration camps or imprisonment camps. One of the camps was a military post at Bismarck, North Dakota, known as Fort Lincoln, the Department of Justice internment camp governed by the Geneva Convention.
Recently, a groundbreaking ceremony was held there to build a memorial for what is known as the Snow Country Prison Japanese-American Internment Memorial. The goal is to bring healing to the troubling wartime treatment of Japanese and Japanese-American civilians. Today, the former Fort Lincoln internment camp is the current campus of United Tribes Technical College.
College administrators and staff have joined with Japanese-Americans, including descendants of former internees, to create a memorial on campus to recognize and honor more than 1,700 first and second generation Japanese-American citizens who were incarcerated here. Dennis Newman, former director of the Office of Public Information at United Tribes Technical College, has been involved with the project for several years. He says part of this project is to also fulfill a promise.
[Dennis Neumann]
This was an important step in moving forward on keeping a promise that the college had made to internee survivors and the families of internee survivors who were incarcerated at Fort Lincoln on this site during World War II. There were promises made at a couple of what you would call gatherings, some have called them pilgrimages, there were programs that were held at the college campus in 2003, one that was called Snow Country Prison, it was the grand opening of a traveling exhibit by that name, and the other in 2010. And at both of those events, there were internee survivors and families of internees.
Then the president of the college, David M. Gipp, made promises to people that United Tribes would, as good stewards of this property, would create a memorial for the internees. And so this step is a big step forward to be able to break ground or have a ground blessing to have what is going to be in a courtyard area near one of the large former barracks buildings, a memorial that will mark the presence here of some 1,700 or so Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans who came through this internment camp during World War II.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
Fort Lincoln was a surplus military post originally constructed during the first decade of the 20th century. Many of the original buildings from 1903 are still intact. In 1941, the fort was converted into a U.S. Department of Justice detention facility for the confinement of noncombatant men. First imprisoned behind the 10-foot-high fences with guard towers were German-American and Italian-American merchant seamen. Then, in 1942, the first wave of Japanese-American citizens and immigrants from the West Coast were forcibly separated from their families and removed to the isolation and cold of Fort Lincoln in North Dakota. In 1945, more arrived from the Tule Lake Segregation Center in Northern California.
They were sent here because they renounced their U.S. citizenship, therefore, were considered enemy aliens. Barbara Takai has been researching Japanese internment camps around the country. Her family was incarcerated at Tule Lake.
She says many falsehoods led to Japanese Americans renouncing their citizenship.
[Barbara Takei]
One of the things about the use of Tule Lake as a segregation center is that it brought all of the people who protested the wartime incarceration, it brought them to Tule Lake, and then the government began to pressure people and become extremely repressive toward the people who were at Tule Lake. And ultimately, with a denationalization program to get rid of the people who protested. And the way they did that was to encourage people to renounce their citizenship as a way to remain in Tule Lake because the war was ending and there was a lot of angst about what would happen if you were forced out into a community without jobs, without housing, without a place to live.
So 5,400 people in Tule Lake renounced their U.S. citizenship. Many did it to remain at Tule Lake until circumstances improved. Others renounced their citizenship in order to protest the injustice of America's abuse.
And still others thought they believed they had to renounce their citizenship in order to go to Japan, that they would only be accepted in Japan if they had renounced their U.S. citizenship. So there were a lot of false narratives. There were a lot of myths.
Nobody really knew what was happening. So there was a lot of confusion and ambiguity about what people's choices were and what the consequences were. And then the government began singling out young men to be removed because, to Department of Justice camps as enemy aliens.
They gave up their U.S. citizenship. Without their U.S. citizenship, they were deemed foreigners, enemy aliens. They had no rights.
They were not protected. They were sent to Department of Justice camps. There were two.
One was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The other was in Bismarck, North Dakota.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
Fort Lincoln got its name, Snow Country Prison, from an internee named Itaru Ina, who wrote of his time in isolation. His most famous haiku was written in 1945, where it says, quote, The war has ended, but I'm still in the Snow Country Prison, end quote. Itaru's daughter, Satsuki, was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center.
She also wrote about her experience as a survivor and descendant of a Fort Lincoln internment camp internee. She's a doctor of psychology specializing in intergenerational trauma. She directed the 1999 documentary, Children of the Camps, based on the letters exchanged between her parents.
Here, she tells of how her father came to the Fort Lincoln location, while the rest of her family stayed in the Tule Lake Segregation Camp.
[Satsuki Ina]
North Dakota, Fort Lincoln here was designated as an internment camp governed by the Geneva Convention. So treatment here was much better for my father. So from Topaz, where my parents answered a so-called loyalty question identified as dissidents, they answered no to the two questions that sent them to Tule Lake, which was the maximum security prison for so-called disloyals.
And that's where I was born. And while I was there with my parents, they began to draft young men out of the prison camp to fight in Europe and in the Pacific Islands. And my father gave a speech protesting that.
He was charged with sedition for interfering with the draft and eventually put in the jail in Tule Lake and then sent to Bismarck, North Dakota. So American citizens didn't go to DOJ camps, but my parents decided to renounce their American citizenship, feeling there was no hope for their children in America. So they renounced and then my father was automatically designated an enemy alien, which made it possible for them to then send him to a DOJ internment camp.
There was so much stigma attached to people who were sent to the internment camps. They were by their own community, other Japanese Americans, and the military officials saw them as not only disloyal but dangerous to the U.S. After we were all released from the prison camps, there was a lot of stigma associated with being a protester. So the story about the internment incarceration, like for my father, was suppressed and in many cases secret from even members of their own family.
My father never spoke about his internment experience, but after he passed away and my mother passed away, I found the letters that they wrote to each other, 182 letters that they exchanged while my father was here, while my mother, brother, and I were still at the Tule Lake prison camp. And so I had like an opportunity to have his haiku poetry translated and to have the letters translated so that I could get firsthand references to their experience here. Since my family's story was even more secret, I felt like I had to, after discovering these letters and diaries, learn more.
And I was in the middle of making a documentary film about my parents' experience based on those letters, came to Bismarck, the site here, internment camp here.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
The Snow Country Prison Japanese American Internment Memorial at United Tribes Technical College is an opportunity to highlight a story about resistance to oppression and raise up the memory of those who suffered incarceration just for standing up as citizens. This is very similar to the persistence of tribal people who have also been challenged throughout history. Dr. Denise Lajimodiere, North Dakota's Poet Laureate and citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, spoke at the memorial groundbreaking event.
[Dr Denise Lajimodiere]
The reservations are just similar to an internment camp. We've called reservations internment camps and concentration camps before, and we were put there. And the Japanese also were rounded up and put into internment camps.
There's a commonality there.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
Satsuki also shares her thoughts.
[Satsuki Ina]
This is the ground blessing, and work will begin and hopefully complete in the next year or two. So it will be a destination point for my community to come here to have ceremony, to remember, to honor the internees that were held here. It will be a point of education for the students on this campus.
And for me, our healing from the massive repetitive racism and trauma inflicted on people of color, our relationship between the Native people and the Japanese American people is a model for working together in solidarity. And to me, personally, over time, I've come to believe that that is the only way that we are really going to heal our country from the ongoing and historic racism trauma that has, you know, been a part of the lives of people of color. And I think efforts have been made to keep us split and separated.
But if we start working together, supporting each other, sharing, like there's going to be a drumming circle in the center of our monument, you know, Native drummers can be there for their ceremonies, and Japanese Americans can bring their taiko drums, their Japanese drums. We can have both drums at the same time. We can blend our ceremonies to honor the college history, the Native stories, and the Japanese American stories.
So I'm really excited about what this can mean.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
Former internees of Fort Lincoln internment camps and the relatives have visited the site for the last 40 years to reflect on the history of what happened. With the college's support, Japanese and Japanese American visitors have been welcomed to tour the site, share their stories, and participate in ceremonies.
[Barbara Takei]
So what is extraordinary is the leadership of the United Tribes Technical College has led an effort to acknowledge a story of Japanese American descent, to preserve that story, and to honor it in a way that our own community has not done for reasons of their own internalized racism and self-hatred, for an act that was completely justified, but that was condemned by the government propaganda as disloyal.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
This memorial will be the first of its kind to acknowledge solidarity between Indigenous and Japanese American communities. The design of this memorial is based on a process used in Japanese ceramics called kintsugi. It uses a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum to mend broken pottery.
It highlights the cracks and turns them into part of the object's history and story. In this case, kintsugi represents the bonding of cultures and communities. This place will also serve as a receptacle for the tsuru, or paper crane offerings, that bring healing and wholeness to this space over time.
The walls will be made of the original slate roofing tiles, claimed from the former prison's roof. There will be amphitheater seating in the courtyard, and the four directions drum circle will serve as the ceremonial center, the heartbeat of the memorial. This will be a shared ceremonial space that honors ganbatte, or endurance and solidarity, that has been exemplified by Japanese American and Indigenous resilience.
An architectural group called MASS Design Group has partnered with the Tribal College and members of the Japanese American community to create this unique monument. The design group's mission is to build and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. Model of Architecture Serving Society, or MASS, is an internationally renowned design firm with representation across 20 countries.
Joseph Kunkel is a principal designer for MASS and also a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. He directs the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab. He says when the request came in looking for a design group, the story of solidarity and resilience of these two particular communities caught their attention.
[Joseph Kunkel]
When we read the RFP, when the request for a design team was asked to come together for the five tribes of North Dakota to acknowledge another population's injustice, was incredibly powerful. And that in turn was like we just need to show up and think about ways in which we can support both the tribal community and the Japanese American community to make this come into fruition. My colleague Jeffrey Mansfield, being a Japanese American descendant of those that were interred here, similar to being Native American, Indigenous, like how can we come together as a design team to think more holistically about bringing a project to fruition?
And here we are.
[Alicia Hegland-Thorpe]
This memorial promises to recognize and catalyze a broader reconciliation process around intersectional patterns of racial oppression and violence, and can serve as a model for other former camps around the country whose planners may be searching for a way to bring healing through the use of acknowledgement and memorialization.
Main Street transcripts are AI generated and corrected on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of Main Street programming is the audio record.