POSTON, AZ

Poston, Arizona is an example of the US government's conflicted, complicated and shameful history regarding its non-European populations. Poston is one of the ten camps set up by the government during World War II to remove Americans of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast where they might "threaten the country's security" in a time of war.

Poston just happens to be on the Colorado River Indian Tribe (CRIT) reservation, set up by an act of Congress almost a hundred years earlier. CRIT is unusual for a reservation because two tribes -- the Mojave and the Chemehuevi -- were resettled to this single location.

The Poston Internment Camp came to pass when the War Relocation Agency and the Bureau of Indian Affairs put their collective heads together and came up with this bit of wisdom: Japanese Americans are hard workers and good farmers. They were to be removed from the West Coast. Why not set them down on an Indian Reservation next to a big river, have them develop an agricultural infrastructure, and then turn the ready-to-go farmland back to the Indians when it is "safe to let" Japanese Americans to return back to their homes.

This is more or less what happened, if you throw in the Hopi and Navajo peoples who were invited to join the Mojaves and Chemehuevis after the Japanese Americans left. Now these four tribes make up the Colorado River Indian Tribes.

I visited Poston today because of my acquaintance with Ruth Okimoto, a Berkeley, California resident who was interned at Poston as a young child. Ruth remembers Hopi families moving into the camp barracks while her family was moving out. Fifty years later she spearheaded the Poston Restoration Project which includes a monument, a website and an annual festival. For more information read her book: Sharing a desert home : life on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Poston, Arizona, 1942-1945 / Ruth Y. Okimoto. (Heyday Books, 2001)

Colorado Tribes Indian Reservation Library
Poston Relocation Camp
Densho Oral History Project