The Tule Lake Pilgrimage: Survivors Who Built Their Own Memorial

By the time the war ended in nineteen forty-five, the Tule Lake Segregation Center had held approximately eighteen thousand people at its peak. The camp's physical structures were dismantled. The land was converted to farms. The Japanese American families who had been incarcerated at Tule Lake were not among those offered homestead allotments, even though incarcerated labor had worked much of this agricultural land during the war years.

For three decades after the war, nothing at this site marked what had happened.

In nineteen seventy-four, former internees organized the first Tule Lake Pilgrimage. There was no monument. There were no interpretive signs. The camp buildings were gone. What the organizers were coming back to was absence: the absence of acknowledgment, the absence of any official record that the government had imprisoned eighteen thousand people here without charge. They came back to say that they remembered.

The pilgrimages continued every year, survivor-led for decades, without government support or official recognition. In two thousand eight, the federal government designated Tule Lake a National Monument. That was thirty-four years after the first pilgrimage.

The annual commemoration continues today, now joined by descendant generations. It is one of the most sustained examples of community-led historical commemoration in California, built entirely by the people the government had imprisoned.

The land they farmed during the war is still farmed. The pilgrims still come.