Note: Guest columnist Natsu Taylor Saito is filling in for Phil Tajitsu Nash while he is on vacation.
The New York Times on August 8 included a clip on “Passing Poston,” a short film about, in the reviewer’s words, “one of the most shameful episodes in United States history: the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.”
My first reaction at seeing the review was one of relief. The mass imprisonment that had traumatized my community, as well as my family, had not been lost to history; our collective struggles against denial had, in some small measure, been vindicated.
Or had they? I only had to read the opening line before my blood began to boil. The internment certainly was shameful, to say nothing of racist and criminal. But “one of the most shameful”? The reviewer said that Poston was located in “a dusty wasteland on the site of a former Indian reservation in the Arizona desert.” Wasn’t this camp located on a functioning reservation, where the Native American residents were forced to accept a makeshift prison on their land and where, at the end of the war, the government plowed under the timber and plumbing rather than let them use the scraps they so desperately needed?
Admittedly, that’s a pretty obscure piece of history. But didn’t it cross the reviewer’s mind that the Native Americans had also been forced onto that “dusty wasteland”?
That very issue of the Times also had an article about the Cobell litigation and how a federal judge has ruled that the U.S. government, which declared itself “trustee” over Native American lands and resources, wasn’t held to the same standard as private trustees.
At issue in the Cobell lawsuit is over the $100 billion due to this country’s poorest people. Judge Royce Lamberth, hardly a raving liberal, was forced to conclude after years of hearings - and shortly before he was summarily removed from the case in 2006 - that the practices at issue were “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.”
The Japanese American internment was shameful - Shameful because it reflected this country’s willingness to intern en masse those perceived as “other,” even orphaned babies; Shameful because it set the precedent for disregarding the Constitution upon the government’s unsupported assertion of “military necessity” or, one might say today, “national security.” To put it in the category of most shameful, however, erases, or at the very least minimizes, our history of mass internments, massacres, chattel slavery and the present quandary that is happening now in the “war on terror.”
The Times on August 8 also reported on the sentencing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan who was convicted of what the government calls the “war crime” of providing material support for terrorism - in this case, driving bin Laden. Mr. Hamdan, who has been held at Guantánamo for more than five years and subjected to coercive treatment of the kind we’re not allowed to know, apparently won the respect of the jury, which acquitted him of the more serious charges and gave him about the lightest sentence they could. Even Judge Keith Allred expressed his hope that Mr. Hamdan would soon be reunited with his wife and daughters, thereby acknowledging the government’s position that, regardless of the verdict, it could hold Mr. Hamdan forever as an “enemy combatant.”
The movie review made my blood boil not because this reviewer was particularly insensitive, but because his phrasing reflects the worst possible outcome of my community’s efforts to bring the injustices of the Japanese American internment to light. Our history - my family’s trauma - is not being used to understand, much less change, this country’s “shameful” practices; it’s being used to minimize them.
But the article on the first military tribunal at Guantánamo also reported that, as he left the courtroom, Mr. Hamdan, “who at times has shown a mischievous sense of humor, raised his arms and said a good-natured, ‘Bye, bye everybody.’” I guess if Salim Ahmed Hamdan can maintain a sense of humor in this world beyond the looking glass, I should be able to as well.
Natsu Taylor Saito is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University and author of From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (Univ. Press of Colorado, 2006).