What Remains: Japanese American World War II Incarceration in Relation to American Indian Dispossession

Abstract

This dissertation examines how government agencies crafted policies that exploited Japanese American incarceration in service of U.S. settler colonialism by settling the land and disciplining Japanese American, American Indian, and Alaska Native people into distinct roles. These policies were often created by different agencies for different sites with different ends: from the expropriation of Japanese American-owned lands by the settler state, white settlers, and corporations; to the placement of concentration camps on American Indian reservations without the consent of the nations to whom those lands belong; to the exploitation of Japanese American incarcerated labor to convert Indigenous lands into homesteads for predominantly white veteran settlers; to the forced removal and incarceration of mixed Alaska Native and Japanese American families from Alaska. Taken together, these policies reveal deeply held settler colonial imperatives that undergird settler state-making even in purportedly unrelated racial projects. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on a combination of state and community-based archives, oral histories, and landscape and material culture analysis to show how communities have theorized and challenged state-based narratives of the incarceration. I argue that these communities have jointly crafted a narrative of relationality that challenges hegemonic understandings of the incarceration, which depict the incarceration as an exceptional moment in U.S. history. The narrative of relationality places Japanese American incarceration in conversation with other examples of racialized and Indigenous forced removal, imprisonment, and other forms of subjugation to show that the U.S. has been constructed on interlocking oppressions.