These sites are five out of a network of nearly 100 wartime detention sites. We chose these sites—Department of Justice, Immigration & Naturalization Services, and U.S. Army internment camps—because they were smaller and more temporary, in some ways, and also because each of the sites remains in use, though not as a prison, today. These sites carry complex challenges to preservation and memorialization, in part because they continue as multipurpose sites but also because they represent an ever-present if invisible threat of detention for reasons of “national security.” What can we learn from remembering prisons that were meant to be forgotten?

Three of these sites—Kooskia, Fort Missoula, and Fort Richardson—held Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) men. Many of these men were arrested on or shortly after December 7, 1941, their names and locations already on a list created by the FBI. Baca Camp, also called Old Raton Ranch Internment Camp, detained 32 Japanese Americans removed from Clovis, NM. Catalina Federal Honor Camp, also called Prison Camp #10 or Tucson Federal Prison, was a road-building camp that detained men from Mexico arrested crossing the border and others arrested for federal crimes, until it became a prison for World War II draft resisters. 

Although these five sites are often excluded from larger histories of Japanese American incarceration, there are local community members and descendants who have dedicated time and resources to maintain the memory of what these sites were, while also continuing to research and ask questions. We are grateful for their work and we are proud to share some of it with visitors to the Seeing Memory site. You can find links to their work throughout the website and on the Resources page.