To protect indigenous Alaskans from Japanese bombs, the U.S. gave them… internment and death
The internment of WWII-era Aleuts decimated 10 percent of the population.
On June 7, 1942, the Japanese invaded Attu, one of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, imprisoning more than three dozen U.S. citizens. The prisoners were Aleuts, an indigenous group that had inhabited these and the Pribilof Islands for more than 8,000 years.
American code breakers knew the attack was coming — they had intercepted the Japanese plan sometime in May or June of 1942 — but the Allied forces in Europe took priority over combat in the Pacific theater. Despite its vulnerable position between Japan and the continental United States, Alaska had few defenses, and plans to evacuate its civilians were only half-baked.
Just four days into the Attu bombing, the Japanese began an 18-hour raid on the island of Kiska that forced the U.S. government to act. Within days, in a flurry of total chaos, the U.S. Army began to evacuate Aleut communities. But the ship that arrived to rescue the refugees delivered them into a different kind of hell. There was no plan. Not even the captain of the USAT Delarof knew where the boat was headed. For two weeks, 560 evacuees from the Pribilovian towns of St. George and St. Paul were stranded on a vessel meant to carry 376 passengers, with only a single toilet between them.
The journey was only the start. Over the course of the next three years, the U.S. government refused to allow the Aleuts to return home, giving them no choice but to live in squalor in substandard internment camps in which 10 percent of the population would not survive. For these injustices, the Aleuts were given paltry compensation that would arrive decades too late. Their story exemplified the American attitude toward its indigenous people. At best, they were a nuisance; at worst, their needs were entirely invisible.
Finally, on June 24, 1942, two weeks after boarding their “rescue ship,” the Delarof dropped anchor at Funter Bay, on Admiralty Island in Southeast Alaska. During the voyage, the Department of the Interior made a hasty deal with a fish-canning company to lease an abandoned cannery to house some of the evacuees.
Left uninhabited for more than a dozen years, the cannery was in bad shape. A handful of cottages — some missing doors and windows and lacking heat — could house a portion of the Aleuts, but most were forced to live in two large barracks, where they fell through rotting wooden floors and slept in shifts in ten-square-foot. Electrical wiring and plumbing fixtures were ripped out, and a large outhouse that had been constructed on the beach was so overtaxed that sewage inundated the shore.
A second location, a mile across the water at the Admiralty Alaska Gold Mine (also called the Funter Bay Mine), was to be the home of 180 Aleut and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) employees from St. George. Conditions there were only slightly better than at the cannery. There was no indoor plumbing, but the interned had a one-shower bathhouse to share. Two pit toilets set on pilings over the beach did little to contain human waste. In his book The Aleut Internments of World War II, Russell W. Estlack records a letter from Daniel C.R. Benson, an FWS agent who traveled with the community to the mine, to his superiors, stating that the dark, unheated quarters would be unfit to live in during winter months. The U.S. government did nothing.
Other refugees were interned at a herring plant in Killisnoo, at a cannery at Burnett Inlet, and at a large boarding school called the Wrangell Institute. Two hundred people housed at Ward Lake, a recreation area eight miles from Ketchikan, then Alaska’s second-largest city, faced serious discrimination from, and exploitation by, locals. They were frequently arrested and fined for “drunken and disorderly conduct,” accused of “infecting public places,” and despised for contaminating the popular recreation area with fecal matter, the result of an antiquated septic system. Within months of their arrival at Ward Lake, venereal diseases like gonorrhea and hepatitis were rampant. By 1943, Ketchikan’s Committee on Police, Health and Sanitation had quarantined the camp.
The internees were irate about their living conditions. A group of Aleut women staying at the Funter Bay cannery protested their situation in a petition:
“This is no place for a living creature. We drink impure water and then get sick and the children’s [sic] get skin disease even the grownups are sick from cold. We ate from the mess house and it is near the toilet only a few yards away. We eat the filth that is flying around. We got no place to take a bath and no place to wash our clothes or dry them when it rains.”
The authorities paid little heed to the protests of the refugees, believing they had saved them from a worse fate in their island homes. Claude M. Hirst, the Alaska Indian Service’s general superintendent, wrote in 1943, “Even though these evacuees may be receiving less than Japs in concentration camps… I am sure that the large majority of them are satisfied under the present conditions.”
Unlike the Japanese interned by the U.S. government in the Lower 48, the Aleuts weren’t forced to stay in their camps, but they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Anyone with the resources to leave had escaped the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands after warnings issued following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. During the forced evacuations, refugees were permitted to bring virtually nothing with them.
Seventy-four Aleut refugees died during their internment due to a lack of heat, inadequate diet, insufficient medical care for preventable diseases, and tuberculosis. The rest waited patiently in deplorable conditions for the government to permit them to return to their homes. Between March and May of 1944, the USAT William L. Thompson was deployed from Seattle to bring Pribilof natives home. Another year passed before those from the Aleutians were returned, in the spring of 1945. Residents from Biorka, Kashega, and Makushin never saw their homes again; those villages were permanently abandoned and their residents forcibly resettled in Akutan and Nikolski.
Though they were promised that their homes and belongings would be protected while they were away, returning Aleuts found their communities unrecognizable. At St. Paul, most of the buildings had been ransacked by the army. Homes were full of snow and water, and personal belongings had been looted. In Unalaska and Atka, homes and outbuildings had been burned to the ground. The government didn’t dispute the vandalism, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that President Roosevelt authorized a total of $25,000 — just $500,000 in today’s terms — from the Presidential Emergency Fund to provide compensation to the 881 Aleuts evacuated by the government. From these funds, Pribilovians received approximately $12 each. Aleutian Islanders got nothing.
It would take the U.S. government a full 43 years to officially recognize Aleut efforts for restitution. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act into law and issued an official apology. For three years of internment against their will, three years of deplorable living conditions with little access to medical care or employment — for the dozens who died and the years of rebuilding the villages the U.S. Army had destroyed — Congress awarded each refugee a total of $12,000.
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