Tule Lake

Tule Lake was the camp inside the camps — the place the government sent the 'disloyal.' After Executive Order 9066 emptied the West Coast of Japanese Americans in 1942, Tule Lake opened as one of ten relocation centers. Then, in July 1943, it was redesignated the segregation center: anyone who answered 'no' to the loyalty questionnaire's questions 27 and 28 — or refused to answer — was shipped here, behind a doubled eight-foot 'man-proof' fence, with tanks and a thousand military police.

Inside, Tule Lake became the largest and angriest of the camps: eighteen thousand people crowded into a site built for fifteen. When a truck crash killed a farmworker in October 1943, the agricultural crews struck; the Army took over the camp; the stockade — a prison within the prison — filled with dissidents held without charges. Some of the incarcerated renounced their citizenship under the pressure; hundreds of those renunciations took decades to undo. The last prisoners left in March 1946.

The file keeps Tule Lake: the 'no-no' boys, the stockade, the strike, and the camp that the government made to hold the people the other camps couldn't break. It's now a national monument — one of the few incarceration sites preserved for what it was.

Tule Lake is the archive's segregation file — the loyalty questionnaire, the stockade, and the camp that became the movement's conscience.