A Stone Left Unturned

2024/06/21 by Mulligan, Adrian N.

paper · doi:10.14288/acme.v21i5.1978

Abstract

In the United States during World War II, under the guise of national security but driven by racial discourse, about 120,000 people were incarcerated on account of their Japanese ancestry. Focusing on one of these incarceration camps, the ‘Gila River War Relocation Center’, located on the Gila River Indian Community reservation in the state of Arizona, in this article I consider how this incarceration might be better understood geographically, while also exploring connections to Indigenous American experiences. Consequently, I explore how one landscape can have different meanings to different communities, resulting in a complicated politics of memory and memorialization, while also uncovering shared landscape experiences that can potentially contribute to the forging of more inclusive historical geographies at this incarceration camp and others.

Related

• The Japanese American wartime incarceration: Examining the scope of racial trauma.
• Japanese incarceration memorial as trauma portfolio play
• The Perpetual Influence of Historical Trauma: A Broad Look at Indigenous Families and Communities in Areas Now Called the United States and Canada
• Decolonizing Memory Work?
• The Commemorative Landscape as a Space of Anti-Racist Activism