Snow Country Prison Memorial opens amid UTTC International Powwow

A version of this article originally appeared in Nichi Bei Weekly.

On Friday, September 5 at the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota a couple hundred people gathered to attend the opening ceremony of the Snow Country Prison Memorial. The audience included local residents, UTTC students and faculty, and about 80 Japanese Americans who journeyed from across the country to participate. The opening ceremony took place during the inaugural Snow Country Prison Pilgrimage, and was scheduled to coincide with UTTC’s 55th Annual International Powwow. The two-day event included a film screening of Emiko Omori’s documentary short Defiant to the Last and a book talk by Satsuki Ina whose memoir “The Poet and the Silk Girl” was published last year.

Featuring remarks from both Japanese American and Native community leaders, the ceremony began with the Sloughfoot Singers drum circle and blessing offered by members of the United Tribes, and a Buddhist prayer led by Reverends Ron Kobata and Duncan Ryuken Williams. Members of the memorial organizing committee were recognized and bestowed with traditional blankets and leis made from origami cranes. Then a recitation of all 1,901 names of those incarcerated at Fort Lincoln during the war were read aloud by the crowd. Performances followed by New York based Ai Dance Theater and TaikoArts Midwest, who hail from the Twin Cities. The ceremony concluded with a joint drum performance blending taiko and Native drum circle traditions, ending in a flute duet featuring Megan Chao Smith on a Japanese shinobue and Dakota Goodhouse on the traditional Lakota-style flute. Attendees were then invited to write the names of their ancestors on origami cranes that were placed on the memorial wall.

The memorial is the culmination of a twenty-five-year effort initiated by SF Bay area resident Satsuki Ina when she first visited the tribal college in 2000 to research the site where her father, Itaru, was incarcerated for about 14 months between 1945-1946.

Known as Fort Lincoln at that time, the site was first commissioned by the US Army in 1895 as an active military post. The Army had maintained a presence in the Bismarck region since 1863 as a forward operating position for the US Cavalry during the decades of military occupation brought forth by American settler-colonialism in the Northern Plains region. In 1872 an earlier Fort Lincoln was built about eight miles to the west of its current site, on the opposite bank of the Missouri River. Stationed at the original Fort Lincoln was General George Custer, renowned for enacting violent campaigns of suppression against Native peoples simply for existing on their ancestral lands. By the time that the second Fort Lincoln was built in 1895, most of the American Indian Wars had ended, but the fort remained a symbol of the ongoing cultural genocide against tribal communities throughout the early 20th century.

During WWII, the site was then used to imprison more than 1,100 Issei men arrested under the Alien Enemies Act. After passing their so-called loyalty hearings, these men were paroled into the custody of the War Relocation Authority and transferred to the larger WRA concentration camps. Later in the war, 750 mostly Nisei renunciants were transferred from Tule Lake. Some were deported to Japan, and others were transferred to detention sites that were jointly administered by the Department of Justice and Immigration Naturalization Service, such as Crystal City, TX or Santa Fe, NM.

Among descendants of the incarcerees formerly held at this site, it has become colloquially known as the Snow Country Prison – coined in a haiku written by Itaru Ina in late 1945. The untitled poem reads, “The war has ended / but I’m still in / the snow country prison.” The average temperature in the winter months could reach as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit, with snow drifts of several feet lasting throughout the winter months. The Issei group incarcerated at the site in 1942 lived in pre-fabricated wood frame buildings with only three-eighths an inch of insulation to protect them from the elements. By 1945 the smaller group of Tule Lake renunciants were allowed to live in the brick buildings that are currently used as student dormitories and classrooms.

Like so much of the wartime history related to Japanese American dissidents, the story of Fort Lincoln has been buried in shame – obscured by the propaganda narrative of loyalty that has erroneously pit the Japanese American community against itself. However, with the introduction of the memorial there exists an opportunity to reclaim this history as a part of the larger narrative, and repair the fracture within community.

The significance of Fort Lincoln being a site of trauma to multiple communities is not lost on the memorial project’s steering committee, as Satsuki Ina shared during her remarks. “When Dr. McDonald and others from United Tribes invited us to fill this space on their land, that they were going to memorialize our histories together… I actually cried when that invitation was made, thinking about the loss of the land that the Native American people have suffered and yet so generously offering us this moment, this place, and the heart of community.”

As a tribal college, UTTC is unique compared to most other institutional partners working within the Japanese American commemorative landscape. Tribal colleges are land-grant institutions that arose from the 1994 expansion of the Morrill Act of 1890. The original intent of the legislation was to create public colleges and universities for African Americans in former confederate states that had enacted Jim Crow laws preventing non-white students from attending segregated white-only universities. Like their counterparts in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges create opportunities for Native Americans to receive higher education in a culturally-relevant setting. Although it has received federal funding as a land-grant institution for the past 31 years, UTTC’s history predates the 1994 law by several decades. The college is a direct result of the North Dakota tribes’ resistance over US government policies aimed at diminishing their ability to self-govern and attempts to terminate their existence.

The United Tribes came about through efforts to collectively organize against Public Law 280, which threatened to grant the state government of North Dakota greater state jurisdictional control over the affairs of Indian people. According to the college website, “during the early 1960s, leaders from four North Dakota tribes joined forces specifically to address the possibility that state authorities might assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian reservations. The tribes were: Devils Lake Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Tribal leaders in North Dakota took exception to the prospect of losing authority on their sovereign lands. During sporadic meetings beginning in 1963, they established a united front opposed to several pieces of state legislation. Ultimately, they succeeded in making North Dakota a PL 280 ‘option state.’ Partial jurisdiction could be assumed by the state only with tribal consent. None of North Dakota’s tribes have concurred.”

Given the centuries-old conflict of settler-colonialism weathered by Indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains, the North Dakota tribes have a legacy of resistance. Countless generations of tribal resistance leaders have come from the Bismarck-Mandan region, including Sitting Bull, one of the most famous resistance fighters in the history of North America. During the second day of the pilgrimage, longtime UTTC archivist Dennis Neumann shared remarks given by the former college president David M. Gipp, who was an early partner in the memorial project. Neumann recalled, “when we were talking about renunciants, he said, "Sitting Bull would have been a renunciant.” Sitting Bull is from his tribe, the Hunkpapa Lakota Tribe.”

This was one of many references made to the shared histories among Japanese Americans and Native Americans during the weekend’s events. Current college president Dr. Leander McDonald elaborated on the many linkages that he observes between his own community and Japanese Americans during the memorial ceremony. “There's been some similarities as we did the research for this memorial between what happened with the Japanese people and what happened with our own people here. There's been centuries of US policy that forcibly removed indigenous nations from their ancestral lands, especially the Land Removal Act of 1830, many were confined to reservations, faced massive loss of territory and sovereignty.”

Reflecting on aspects of the Japanese American experience that he personally related to, McDonald continued, “they were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and communities to live in internment camps. In both cases, US authorities exercised a paternalistic rationale, justifying forced relocation as protective or necessary, despite being rooted in racial and cultural prejudice. Both of these experiences were rooted in systemic racism.”

McDonald shared the same statement during the first night of the International Powwow when introducing the Japanese American delegation to the thousands of attendees. Japanese American pilgrims were invited to participate in the Powwow’s “grand entry” when individuals representing the various tribes were ceremoniously welcomed into the arena. McDonald’s words were well-received by the crowd of several thousand.  

One point he made seemed to strike a chord with the audience of mostly Native Americans, “there's a striking often overlooked connection. Some internment camps were built on or near lands formerly belonging to Native Americans, and even used incarcerated Japanese American labor to develop infrastructure for post-war homesteading, effectively further dispossessing our Indigenous people. So we see this parallelism in what happened to our people and to the Japanese people in the internment era. And we bring that perspective in what was developed here for this memorial.”

As McDonald suggested, the design of the memorial itself reflected these overlapping histories, stewarded by representatives of both communities. Designed by the social-justice architectural firm, MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, an international design collective with members in twenty countries, the core team included Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield, a mixed-race Yonsei and Joseph Kunkel, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation.  

During the opening ceremony, Kunkel shared how their backgrounds connected to the memorial design process. “Jeff and I came across this project in 2019-2020 when we saw the RFP come out, and we thought what an amazing opportunity for a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and a descendant of a Japanese American to come together to work on such a memorial. It was a way for us to think about how our two histories could be ingrained in this work.” Kunkel also explained the Native American symbolism behind some of the memorial’s iconography. “At the heart of the design is the drum circle. This is where stories can be shared, learnings can be had, and where we can all come together as the drummers shared this morning. If you look at this drum circle, it is designed in a way that speaks to the four directions. We're lifting up the four directions, Mother Earth, the connections of Mother Earth, and Father Sky.”

Mansfield then explained how his Japanese American heritage also factored into the design. “As we started this work, we were very sensitive and paid attention to the fact of how internment of Japanese Americans, during World War II, caused a fracture, it shattered our communities and our families all across the country. We were interested in considering kintsugi as the artistic form with this project, and how we can piece together these broken fractured components to create something that's beautiful, something that's strong, something that shows resilience, and that there's beauty in the suffering that we've endured.”

In designing the memorial to reflect such meaningful traditions from both cultures, the design team has succeeded in not only creating a vessel to repair the fractures of the Japanese American community, but have also created a means for Japanese Americans and Native Americans to be drawn closer together.

To learn more about the Snow Country Prison Memorial, visit: www.uttc.edu/about-uttc/visit-our-campus/snow-country-prison-memorial-at-bismarck/