Poston: The Camp Built on Tribal Land Without Consent

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, the federal government needed land in the Arizona desert. It needed a lot of it, remote enough to contain seventeen thousand people, with access to water. The Colorado River Indian Tribes had land. The federal government took it.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes Tribal Council voted against allowing the War Relocation Authority to build an incarceration camp on their reservation near Parker, Arizona. The federal government proceeded anyway. The Poston War Relocation Center opened in May of nineteen forty-two. At its peak, it held seventeen thousand eight hundred and fourteen Japanese Americans, making it the largest of the ten War Relocation Authority camps in the United States. It was the only one built on federally recognized tribal land, and the only one built over the explicit objection of the tribe whose territory it occupied.

The camp was nicknamed by its residents Roastin, Toastin, and Dustin, after the three separate complexes set down in the desert. Summer temperatures regularly exceeded one hundred and fifteen degrees. The barracks were built from green lumber that cracked in the heat, letting in dust and insects. The residents, most of them American citizens, had been removed from their homes on the Pacific Coast under Executive Order Nine Thousand and Sixty-Six, which the government did not frame as imprisonment. They called it evacuation.

Inside the camp, residents organized schools, published the Poston Chronicle, and created cultural institutions. In November of nineteen forty-two, a work strike shut down operations in the camp for two days to protest the arrest of two residents. Organizers maintained order; administrators backed down on some demands.

The Poston camp closed in November of nineteen forty-five. The Colorado River Indian Tribes did not receive compensation for the use of their land. The federal government that had forcibly relocated Indigenous people from this landscape in the eighteen hundreds had now used that same landscape to confine Japanese Americans, over the protests of the tribe that had been placed there as the end result of an earlier round of forced removal. Two distinct applications of federal power against two distinct communities, at one location, separated by half a century.

A small monument stands at the site today. The National Historic Landmark designation was added in two thousand one.