An Internment Camp Within an Internment Camp

Feb. 19, 2008 — -- For Japanese-Americans, Feb. 19 marks the Day of Remembrance. That's the day in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 and put into motion the government's forced removal and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry — 60 percent of whom were American citizens.

Military officials considered anyone of Japanese descent, whether a U.S. citizen or not, to be a potential spy and a security risk.

With little notice, Japanese were gathered up and ordered to leave their homes, businesses and friends to be incarcerated without trial. They could only take what they could carry and were moved to 10 internment camps spread across some of the nation's most inhospitable terrains.

In "Passing Poston: An American Story," a documentary premiering this month, filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile disclose a surprising and little-known secret about the Poston internment camp in the Arizona desert. Poston was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation for a specific reason: Japanese detainees were brought to the desolate location to provide free, forced labor for the American government.

Ruth Okimoto, who spent her childhood years locked up in Poston, was haunted decades later by the experience. Cameras tracked her journey as she traveled back to Poston and research its beginnings.

"There was a different purpose for Poston besides just being an internment camp. I think the first discovery that absolutely startled me was finding out that the Office of Indian Affairs [now the Bureau of Indian Affairs] was in charge of running the Poston camp, along with the War Relocation Authority, who ran the nine other internment camps."

The Japanese were ordered to build the infrastructure — schools, dams, canals and farms — so the U.S. government could consolidate scattered American Indian tribes from smaller reservations in one place after the war.

Okimoto learned that the U.S. government had been trying unsuccessfully for decades to bring water from the Colorado River to the reservation. Historian Michael Sosi, of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, said it was a government official named John Collier who figured out an ingenious way to accomplish the task.