Justice Denied and Forgotten: The Hidden History of Alaska's World War II Internment Camps

This paper has four parts. Part I gives the necessary historical background on the Unangax̂ up to and during evacuation during World War II. Part II details the conditions of the camps in both Alaska and the continental United States, alongside the return home for both communities. (Most of Part II will be focused on the experience of the Unangax̂, given that lower-48 internment camp history is more widely known.) Part III is a short history of the redress and reparations movement. Part IV explores why the two groups were interned during World War II and the differences in their reparations. Although Japanese American internment was justified as a kind of “security response” during the War, Unangax̂ internment was supposedly for their own protection. But by looking at the orientalization of both Unangax̂ and Japanese Americans, each group’s control over valuable resources, and the difference in reparations, this paper identifies how these disparate groups were tied together by the federal government’s colonial, racist acts.