Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture - Hardcover

Dickerson, James L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155652806X ISBN 13: 9781556528064

Verlag: Chicago Review Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Xenophobia, paranoia, and racism have long challenged democracy, a battle played out dramatically in the concentration camps that were built, staffed, and filled with adults and children under the orders of the U.S. government. Beginning in the nineteenth century with the imprisonment of Native Americans, camps reappeared during World War II with the roundup of Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, and Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. They resurfaced recently when Homeland Security awarded a major contract to a subsidiary of Halliburton for the construction of new camps.

In Inside America's Concentration Camps, author James L. Dickerson explores the history and the tragedy of the camps in a vivid narrative that brings the stories of the victims and the flaws of our government to life. Rebecca Neugin, Eleanor Berg, Roy Abbey, Marino Sichi, Louise Ogawa—these are some of the children and adults whose stories are found here, along with accounts of the U.S. government yanking children out of orphanages to imprison them in the camps.

To fight the erosion of democracy, Americans must remain aware of threats to our democratic ideals and understand where we have been. Inside America's Concentration Camps is an authoritative history, a heartbreaking and inspirational story of survival, and a call to action.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James L. Dickerson is an investigative journalist and the author of Devil’s Sanctuary, North to Canada, and Yellow Fever. He was a staff writer at the Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, the Commercial Appeal, the Delta Democrat-Times, the Greenwood Commonwealth, and the Tallahassee Democrat.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Inside America's Concentration Camps

Two Centuries of Internment and Torture

By James Dickerson

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2010 James L. Dickerson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55652-806-4

Contents

Author's Note, 
Introduction, 
Prologue: From Sea to Shining Sea, 
PART I: NUNNA DUAL TSUNY (THE TRAIL WHERE THEY CRIED), 
1 The Origins of Internment in Colonial America, 
2 Walking the Trail of Tears, 
PART II: CAMPS THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY, 
3 Pearl Harbor Under Attack, 
4 Executive Order 9066, 
5 Manzanar's Gateway to Hell, 
6 Life in an Arkansas Swamp, 
7 Eastward Ho to the Wild, Wild West, 
8 The Konzentrationslager Blues, 
9 Italian Americans Dodge a Bullet, 
10 Jews Turned Away from a New Promised Land, 
11 Finding Redemption in a Troubled Land, 
12 Prisoner, Go Home!, 
13 Righting the Wrongs, 
PART III: ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, 
14 Modern-Day Internment, 
15 "Why Is This Thing Happening in This Country?", 
16 Which Camp Will You Someday Call Home?, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE ORIGINS OF INTERNMENT IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Scotsmen began immigrating to America only four years before John Turner was exiled to the colonies. By the time of his arrival more than seven hundred Scots had settled in a colony in New Jersey. Perhaps because of his nightmarish experiences in Scotland, Turner found life in a colony under British control not to his liking, primarily because of the fierce violence inflicted on Native Americans and the subsequent retribution inflicted on the settlers by the Indians. He traveled north into the New York wilderness and found work with a rowdy band of trappers who worked the forest north into Canada, where they gathered pelts that they sold to the colonists.

For five years, John traveled with the trappers throughout New York and across the St. Lawrence River into Quebec. It was on the St. Lawrence that he met explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who told him about a paradise he had discovered on Lake Michigan, near what is now called South Bend, Indiana. In 1693, after skirmishes with the Indians in northern New York and with English soldiers who demanded his valuable trappers' pelts, John left the trappers and headed south to Maryland, a territory known for its tolerance of Presbyterians.

Living among the settlers were several tribes of Algonquin Indians, including the Conoy (also called the Piscataway), a tribe that lived on the banks of the Potomac River on land that is now Washington, D.C. They were unique in that they were the only tribe in the colonies that allowed women to serve as chiefs. A peace-loving people, they traded with the settlers and responded well to teachings about Christianity. When they went to war, it was with Indian tribes to the south, not the settlers.

The Conoy were distinguished by black hair, dark eyes, and copper skin. They were taller than the colonists, even the women, and they had stronger builds than the whites. They wore their hair long, often pulled back into locks and tied with strings of shells. Many of the men shaved their hair from half of their heads. Some of the women had colored designs on their bodies that indicated whether they were single or members of the tribal leadership council. In the summer, men and women dressed in deerskin wraps that left their chests exposed; in winter they wore long cloaks, leggings, and well-insulated moccasins.

Soon after his arrival John witnessed a ceremony during which the leader of the Conoy, a tall, beautiful woman in her early twenties, strode into the white settlement with the bearings of a queen. John had never seen a female chief, and he was struck by her great beauty. After she left the settlement, he asked about her and was told that she was a chief but didn't yet have a husband.

John trapped and hunted on the Potomac for several weeks, unable to get the Conoy chief out of his mind. He returned to the camp, determined to make her his wife. Before the year ended, John married the chief, even though it was illegal at that time for whites to marry Indians. He renamed her Jane in an effort to promote her acceptance by whites. Despite the discrimination they faced from both whites and Indians, they were determined to have the freedom that John had dreamed of finding in America; but that proved difficult because life was changing radically in the colonies.

In the beginning, white settlers were content to build isolated settlements in America that respected the boundaries declared by Native Americans. But as white settlers arrived in ever-increasing numbers, creating an insatiable demand for settlement land, peaceful coexistence was replaced by a clumsily drafted relocation strategy of pushing Native Americans farther into the interior, the forerunner of modern-day internment. Advocates of that strategy were the powerful British corporations that garnered massive profits by seizing America's vast natural resources. Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, British corporations such as East India Company, South Sea Company, and Virginia Company were as wealthy and powerful as any twenty-first-century American corporation.

Corporate economic expansion in the colonies translated into racial and ethnic cleansing — residents who did not contribute to corporate economic expansion were forced out of their homes. John and Jane Turner found life in the colonies intolerable. For love, Jane had given up her leadership role with the Conoy and John had given up any hope of advancement in white society. They truly became stateless when the corporations pressured whites to seize Conoy land, thus cleansing the colonies of landowning Indians. Unable to live among whites or Indians, John and Jane went westward, beyond the reach of nefarious corporations and racist Indian-haters.

John and Jane followed the directions that La Salle had provided and traveled west until they reached the St. Joseph River, south of Lake Michigan. It was an area that would later be named South Bend, Indiana (Indiana means In dih an ah, land of the Indians, so named because of the many tribes that migrated there after being pushed off their land by the colonists). Most of the indigenous Indians on the St. Joseph River belonged to the Miami tribe, a member of the Algonquin nation, which also included the Conoy. For that reason, John and Jane were allowed to settle on the river. They picked out a piece of land on a high bluff overlooking the river and built a cabin. Protected by the Miami, they hunted, trapped and fished, and traded with the French, who set up trading posts to receive furs from the Miami. They also had four children: two girls and two boys, Richard and Samuel, the latter of whom was born when John was thirty-six. Those were good years for the Turners, although they found it necessary, from time to time, to fight with the Miami against their common enemy, the Iroquois. That part of the country was so remote that the settlement of South Bend would not be established for another 120 years. For the first time in his life John found true happiness and sanctuary.

John lived to be one hundred years old, and Jane lived to be ninety-five. They remained close in their old age, always sitting near enough to each other to be able to reach out and touch. Never once did they return to the colonies. Jane often thought about her ancestral land, but she knew she would never return to lay claim to it. When the end came for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 155652806X
• ISBN 13: 9781556528064
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar