Gila River Relocation Center

Gila River was a city built on someone else's land to hold people the government had dispossessed. The War Relocation Authority leased 16,500 acres from the Gila River Indian Community — over the tribe's objections — and built the camp on the reservation fifty miles south of Phoenix. When it reached its peak population of 13,348 in November 1942, it was the fourth-largest city in Arizona. The post office designation was Rivers, named for Jim Rivers, the first Pima killed in action in the First World War — the camp named for a Native soldier of a country that was imprisoning other Americans on Native land.

The center was two camps three and a half miles apart — Canal and Butte — holding people removed from Los Angeles, Sacramento, the San Joaquin Valley, and Hawaiʻi. The barracks were poorly insulated against summers over a hundred degrees; the incarcerees built swamp coolers, planted gardens and shade trees, dug fish ponds — making a desert prison livable. Gila River was the only camp with an active Japanese American Citizens League chapter; the people organized community councils even as the WRA ruled only citizens could serve on them.

The camp closed in November 1945, and the land went back to the Community — which restricts access to the site today. What remains is on tribal ground: foundations, the canal system, the butte that watched over the barracks. The Gila River Indian Community has built its own memorial relationship to the site — the land remembers a city that existed for three years in service of an injustice done twice: to the incarcerated, and to the reservation it was built on without consent.

Gila River is the archive's reservation file — the fourth-largest city in Arizona, built on Native land over Native objection to hold Americans of Japanese ancestry, named for a Pima soldier, closed and returned to the desert that keeps its foundations.