UC Berkeley Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research Title Cowboys, Indians, and Aliens: White Supremacy in the Klamath Basin, 1826-1946 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3f17j5nq Author Ikeda, Andrea Publication Date 2015-04-01 Undergraduate eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cowboys, Indians, and Aliens: White Supremacy in the Klamath Basin, 1826-1946 by Andrea Ikeda A senior thesis submitted to the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Department of Ethnic Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Bachelor of the Arts University of California, Berkeley Gender & Women’s Studies H195; Ethnic Studies H196A/H196B Juana María Rodríguez and Alani Hicks-Bartlett; Keith Feldman and Khatharya Um June 12, 2015 Ikeda 1 Cowboys, Indians, and Aliens White Supremacy in the Klamath Basin, 1826-1946 Contents 1. Introduction 2 2. Land: Settler Colonialism and the Consolidation of Empire 6 The Violence of Exploration The Rise of Settler Capitalism Reservations about Reservations Settler Indigenization 3. Labor: Orientalism and the Defense of Empire 22 Exogenous Exploitation Yellow Peril, White Terror When Logics Collide and Collude Inv/Asians and Competing Colonial Regimes 4. The Japanese Problem: Wartime White Supremacy 44 Confronting the Japanese Problem Toward Removal Defending the Home Front The Basin on the Brink of War Siting Spaces of Exception Movement as Colonization 5. Reanimating the Frontier: Inside the Crucible of Disloyalty 69 Spaces of Exception, Spaces of Confinement Japs and Savages Civilizing the Enemy Education for Extinction Labor among Locals 6. Epilogue: Imagining Endings 85 Ikeda 2 Sir: I am here for the purpose [of] putting the Modoc Indians upon this reservation … You are directed to remove the Modoc Indians to the Klamath Reservation, peaceably if you can, but forcibly if you must. T.B. ODENEAL, OREGON SUPERINTENDENT OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, TO ARMY LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANK WHEATEN, NOVEMBER 25, 1872 INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY LIVING IN THE FOLLOWING AREA: … Pursuant to the provisions of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 … all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o'clock noon, P. W. T., Sunday, May 9, 1942. WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION, MAY 3, 1942 If there be those who would say we can’t do this to citizens, let them remember that we took this country from the Indians, killed thousands of them, arbitrarily moved other thousands from their homes to far-distant lands, and to this day have denied them the rights, privileges and duties of citizenship. If we could do that to the Indians, we can do something about the Japs. Let’s do it now! W. M. MASON, UNDATED LETTER TO THE EDITOR, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER 1. Introduction My grandfather was considered an enemy of the United States by the time he was ten years old. In 1942, he, his three younger siblings, and their parents were forced to leave behind their home and community in Los Angeles, CA to be incarcerated with nearly 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry as wartime hysteria portrayed all Japanese/Americans1 as racially threatening to the US. They were sent first to the War Relocation Authority’s concentration camp in Jerome, AR, then to Rohwer, AR, and—ultimately—to the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center in far northern California. Ikeda 3 I set out on this research project seeking to make sense of the World War II-era incarceration of my family at the Tule Lake camp from a geographical perspective informed by ethnic studies and feminist theory; however, beginning my investigation with the history of anti- Asian and anti-Japanese sentiment leading up to World War II felt insufficient—something of fundamental and foundational importance was missing. The Tule Lake camp was located in the Klamath Basin, a region that straddles the California-Oregon border. The Basin’s history of exclusion and violence in the name of white supremacy can be traced back decades before any Japanese/Americans were confined there behind barbed wire and guard towers. As with the rest of the continent, the region was originally inhabited by many autonomous groups of Indigenous peoples; however, by the outbreak of World War II, this Indigenous presence was virtually gone. In light of this erasure, I began to wonder if violence against Native people, particularly the Modoc Indians, informed the treatment of Japanese/Americans in the Basin seven decades later—and, if so, how? As the epigraphs above demonstrate, clear linkages connect the two sets of experiences across temporal distance and unique relationships with racism. The research questions that have animated my research include: How has racial difference been articulated through conceptions of space, place, mobility, and belonging? How have relationships between the logics of settler colonialism, slavery, and Orientalism manifested in the Klamath Basin since the mid-1800s? How did the Japanese/Americans incarcerated at the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center navigate and interact with the legacies of Indigenous dispossession and genocide? I turned to the emerging field of settler colonial studies to provide a theoretical framework that would allow me to put the histories of Native Americans and Japanese/Americans in conversation with each other to provide a more complete account of the Ikeda 4 ways in which the Klamath Basin has been—and continues to be—shaped by ongoing and interlocking processes that uphold white supremacy. My methods were entirely historical and archival. Many of my primary sources came from electronically accessible archives, such as the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive, the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study, and the Online Archive of California. I also examined local newspapers from the Klamath Basin in microfilm format. These materials—which were produced by a variety of actors, including government officials, white researchers, Japanese/American researchers within the actual camps, and white residents of the Klamath Basin—provided invaluable texture and depth to my project. This is fundamentally a project of what Nahum Chandler calls “desedimentation”—a process through which “layers of sedimented premises” that uphold various ideologies, discourses, and ways of being and knowing are made to tremble.2 The power of desedimentation lies in instigating a “destabilization of ground, field, or domain, a movement that could expose sediment that had been deeply locked and fixed in place, or set into relief new lines of possible concatenation, or turn up old ground into new configurations of its elements. Such a practice, that is, might turn up new soil on old ground.”3 The treatment of Japanese/Americans during World War II is, in many ways, intellectual “old ground.” It has been the topic of many scholarly works produced over the last seven decades; however, many of these works approach the subject in ways that don’t necessarily examine underlying assumptions of the systems and structures of the modern liberal state. As a result, the current literature is often limited to discussing oppression and violence in terms of citizenship and rights—legal rights, human rights, civil rights, and so on. While these approaches do have a role to play, they tend to take categories like “American” at face value without interrogating the formation and utilization of the categories Ikeda 5 themselves—what does it mean to be American? Who has access to identifying as American? What are the operations of power that have shaped and re-shaped the boundaries of Americanness? Settler colonial studies and Indigenous critical theory offer the potential to reframe these issues by asking different kinds of questions that might lead to desedimentation of some of the most fundamental foundations of the white supremacist nation. My research is situated in a key moment in the trajectory of settler colonial studies as a field of interpretation and analysis. Seminal works on settler colonialism, such as those by Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe,4 have primarily focused on Australia and Aotearoa / New Zealand as settler societies—scholarly work that theorizes the settler past, present, and future of the continental United States in similar ways is still nascent. In recent years, those who do ground their analyses of the US in settler colonial studies—among them Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Mack Faragher, Margaret D. Jacobs, Andrea Smith, and Manu Vimalassery5—all locate in the emerging field a unique potential to make sense of American history and encourage other scholars to do the same. Settler colonial studies and Indigenous critical theory encourage relational approaches to research. Questions of comparison can often degenerate into basic assertions of similarity and difference, but questions of relationality enable further discussion about how these similarities and differences interact with and inform each other. In the context of settler colonialism, recuperating relationality is fundamental to enacting what Saranillio calls a “settler of color critique of US Empire”: “While not uncomplicated, placing Asian American and Native histories in conversation might create the conditions of possibility of using settler colonialism against itself, where social justice-oriented Asian Americans might conceptualize liberation in ways that are accountable to Native aims for decolonization.”6 Ikeda 6 This paper consists of four major sections, each of which explores in detail a particular theme or set of themes of white supremacy in relation to the Klamath Basin. These sections are organized in (loose) chronological order. The first section concentrates on the establishment of white settler communities through acts of genocide and and other forms of elimination of Indigenous life. The second takes up questions of immigration, race, and labor in the context of Orientalism. Third, I turn to the discourses and considerations that animated white Americans’ responses to the so-called “Japanese Problem” along the West Coast in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The final section discusses the Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center itself as a frontier-like space structured by the complex interactions of multiple systems of white supremacy. I close by returning to the possibility of desedimenting white supremacy through strategic research practices, asking, “What does the end of a settler colonial society look like?” 2. Land: Settler Colonialism and the Consolidation of Empire The Violence of Exploration The history of the modern US West is, first and foremost, a story of genocide. Scenes of extreme violence played out across North America as the United States expanded westward during the 18th and 19th centuries. Manifest destiny, or the belief that white Americans7 had a divine right—a religiously mandated duty, even—to occupy the continent from coast to coast and to remake the land into the world’s foremost example of capitalist power, relied upon settler colonial conceptions of space, race, and sovereignty that required uprooting Indigenous communities and eliminating their existences in both material and discursive ways. The extension of US empire by any means necessary, as Reginald Horsman notes, was a project of white supremacy from the outset: Ikeda 7 By 1850 American expansion was viewed in the United States less as a victory for the principles of free democratic republicanism than as evidence for the innate superiority of the American Anglo-Saxon branch of the Caucasian race. In the middle of the nineteenth century a sense of racial destiny permeated discussions of American progress and of future American world destiny.8 To white Americans, the West represented a space of almost unlimited opportunity for the pursuit of the purported “American ideals” of individualism, capitalism, and private property ownership. Westward movement to the backcountry “served as a means of gaining access to enough land for existing modes of agricultural production as well as to the kind of personal independence (for White men) that constituted the basis for political subjectivity and participation.”9 These opportunities, however, came at the expense of Indigenous peoples across the continent, whose very existence within a settler colony challenges its legitimacy, thereby justifying the total elimination of all things Indigenous through a multitude of overlapping mechanisms.10 From the outset, US-sponsored incursions into the Klamath Basin and Modoc land were motivated by this promise of white acquisition and backed by the threat of Native dispossession. The first documented interaction between the Modocs and white settlers took place in late 1826, when a party of explorers traversed the land with a dual mission of charting “new” territory and identifying suitable sites for the expansion of the booming fur trade.11 Though the first moments of contact were not marked by outright conflict or hostility, the journals and other documents published by members of the initial expedition served as catalysts and guides for a more-or-less steady influx of white explorers and settlers into the Klamath Basin as early as 1846. This discourse of “exploration” and “discovery” illuminates two key elements of settler colonial expansion: first, the denial of Indigenous presence and humanity, and, second, the centrality of the profit motive. Ikeda 8 One of the many ways in which settler colonialism enacts violence is through the reconfiguration of narratives of time, space, and humanity to center the settler state. This process assigns emptiness to indigeneity in all dimensions. In other words, Indigenous ways of being in and relating to the world, Indigenous histories prior to colonization, and Indigenous peoples themselves are rendered invisible and nonexistent, as indigeneity is interpreted as mere lack or absence in direct opposition to the indisputable presence imposed by the settler. As a result, settler narratives often emphasize the establishment of settler communities through uncontested arrival in vast, uninhabited spaces, in which the settler way of life is imagined to be the only possibility—that is, through ascribing territorial, populational, and ontological forms of emptiness to the lands and peoples being colonized. Settlers routinely placed Indigenous peoples outside of the category of “human” by linking them to savagery, monstrosity, and animality in the process of “transforming indigenous peoples into the homo nullius inhabitants of lands emptied and awaiting [settler] arrival.”12 Sir Walter Raleigh described the indigenes of the East Coast as having “their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts,” while another white explorer-settler believed them to be “wild and savage…[living] like herds of deer in a forest.”13 Prospectors flocked to the West Coast in the late 1840s and early 1850s in response to multiple discoveries of gold in California and Oregon, and the rapid inflation of the area’s white population provoked the Modocs’ first instances of armed resistance in the form of sporadic raids on incoming wagons. This, in turn, sparked a series of merciless massacres of entire Modoc communities—often as retribution for actions wrongly attributed to the Modocs in the first place. The rhetoric of dehumanization fed directly into these acts of genocidal violence, as one settler recognized in his personal notes: