Immediately following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, numerous Japanese, German, and Italian aliens were arrested and detained on no specific grounds, without the due process guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution, and were sent to INS detention camps at Fort Missoula, Montana; Bismarck, North Dakota; and elsewhere. The INS camps were separate and distinct from the ten major camps under War Relocation Authority (WRA) supervision. The WRA camps, including one at Minidoka, in southern Idaho, housed some 120,000 American citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who were unconstitutionally evacuated, relocated, and imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II.
Although there were a number of Justice
Department internment camps
throughout the United States during WWII, the Kooskia Internment Camp
was
unique because it was the only camp of its
kind in the United States.
Its inmates had volunteered to go there from other camps, and received
wages for their work. A total of some 265 male Japanese aliens;
24
male and 3 female Caucasian civilian employees; 2 male internee
doctors, one Italian and one German; and 1 male Japanese American
interpreter occupied the Kooskia
Internment Camp at various times between May 1943 and May 1945.
Although
some of the internees held camp jobs, most of the men were construction
workers for a portion of the present Highway 12 between Lewiston,
Idaho,
and Missoula, Montana, parallel to the wild and scenic Lochsa River.
The
Japanese internees at the Kooskia camp came from Alaska, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Florida,
Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon,
Pennsylvania,
Texas, Utah, and Washington. They included Reverend Hozen Seki,
founder of the New York Buddhist Church; Toraichi Kono, former employee
of Charlie Chaplin; and Japanese Latin Americans kidnapped from their
respective countries, chiefly Peru, by U.S. government agencies.
"Digging in the documents" has
produced INS, Forest Service, Border Patrol, and University of Idaho
photographs and other
records.
These, combined with internee and employee oral and written interviews,
illuminate the internees' experiences, emphasizing the perspectives of
the men detained at the Kooskia Internment Camp.
Wegars is completing a book manuscript
on the Kooskia
Internment Camp, tentatively titled "Imprisoned
in Paradise: Japanese Internees Build a Highway in the
Wilderness."
Based on a decade of grant-assisted historical research using archives,
diaries, photographs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews with
participants, "Imprisoned in Paradise"
is a serious work of non-fiction
that is both readable and well-documented. A university press is
currently evaluating the manuscript.
Although two other groups are
peripheral to the main narrative, so will not be fully discussed in the
book, their exploits add
background and interest to "Imprisoned
in Paradise." One is the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp
of "city slickers" from New York State. They inhabited the site while
working on Forest Service projects for several months in 1933. Next,
from mid-1935 until May 1943, the compound became the Canyon Creek
Prison Camp holding convicts from the federal prison in Leavenworth,
Kansas, as well as local conscientious objectors. As with the later
Japanese internees, the inmates worked on construction of the present
U.S. Highway 12, then called the Lewis-Clark Highway. One prisoner, a
member of the jackhammer crew, declared that the granite they drilled
was "as hard as a district attorney's heart."
Click here
for a list of California towns of origin or residence for Kooskia
internees.
Click here
for information on how to obtain Department of Justice (DOJ) Closed
Legal Case Files (CLCF) from the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA).
Click here for a table of Justice Department and U.S. Army Internment Camps and Detention Stations in the U.S. during World War II.
Click here
for tables related to food and clothing at the Kooskia Internment Camp.
Click
here
for tables related to bids for services, if needed, covering
hospitalization and death [no deaths occurred] at the Kooskia
Internment Camp.
For more information, to schedule a
talk, or to request a book proposal, please contact:
Priscilla Wegars
Kooskia Internment Camp Project
735 East Sixth Street
Moscow, Idaho 83843
(208) 882-7905; pwegars@moscow.com