A Stone Left Unturned
Landscape, Race, and Memory at the Gila River War Relocation Center
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i5.1978Résumé
In the United States during World War II, under the guise of national security but driven by racial discourse, about 120,000 people were incarcerated on account of their Japanese ancestry. Focusing on one of these incarceration camps, the ‘Gila River War Relocation Center’, located on the Gila River Indian Community reservation in the state of Arizona, in this article I consider how this incarceration might be better understood geographically, while also exploring connections to Indigenous American experiences. Consequently, I explore how one landscape can have different meanings to different communities, resulting in a complicated politics of memory and memorialization, while also uncovering shared landscape experiences that can potentially contribute to the forging of more inclusive historical geographies at this incarceration camp and others.
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© Adrian Mulligan 2022
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