User:LatakiaHill/aleut

Aleut interment camps

Date	June 12, 1942 to April 1945
Location	Alaska

The relocation of Aleutians was the forced movement of the Aleut people in Alaska by the United States during World War II from 1942 to 1945. The relocation was done in response to the Aleutian Islands campaign, with the stated purpose of protecting the Aleut from Japanese forces. However, the evacuation was handled poorly for multiple reasons, with the Aleuts interned in poor conditions and suffering high death rates, being held far longer after the Japanese threat in Alaska was gone, and their original villages razed and looted by American soldiers. In total, 881 Aleuts were interned during the three-year period, with the death rate around 1 out of 10 citizens. The relocation also contributed to the destruction of Aleut culture, as many elders succumbed to the unsanitary conditions and infectious diseases that were rampant in the abandoned warehouses and factories that were used to contain the Aleuts.

In the Aleut Restitution Act of 1988, the US congress issued a formal apology for the unjust harm caused by the relocation and monetarily recompensed the Aleut citizens. Some scholars have also held that the relocation, beyond being a logistical disaster, involved other calculations and interests for the government. Historian Dean Kohlhof recalls that in 1943, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service demanded that the interned Aleuts to return to the Aleutian chain where the war was still ongoing to carry out the government's million-dollar annual seal hunt; the Aleuts were made to hunt again in their homelands but had to return to the internment camps ostentatiously under the danger of the war, and "disobedient Aleuts" were threatened with being barred from returning home if they did not participate in the seal hunt. Others have speculated that the US government did the relocation partly in fear that Aleuts would ally themselves with the Japanese, pointing to how white residents of Aleutian villages were not evacuated and were permitted to stay during this period.

Sources

An enforced odyssey: The relocation and internment of Aleuts during World War IIduring World War II - Ryan Howard Madden https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2766&context=dissertation

Sepez, Jennifer, et al. "Unalaska, Alaska: memory and denial in the globalization of the Aleutian landscape." Polar geography 30.3-4 (2007): 193-209. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10889370701742977

White, G. Edward. "The Lost Internment." The Green Bag 14: 283-300. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/grbg14&div=43&id=&page=

World War II Aleut Relocation Camps in Southeast Alaska - Introduction https://www.nps.gov/articles/aleu-mobley-intro.htm

The U.S. Forcibly Detained Native Alaskans During World War II - Erin Blakemore https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-forcibly-detained-native-alaskans-during-world-war-ii-180962239/

Agony of the Aleutians: The forgotten internment - Eva Holland https://www.adn.com/we-alaskans/article/forgotten-internment/2014/11/09/

IN 1942, INTERNMENT; IN 1981, AN INQUIRY https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/09/opinion/in-1942-internment-in-1981-an-inquiry.html

See also

• Internment of Japanese Americans
• Internment of German Americans
• Internment of Italian Americans
• Internment of Japanese Canadians