Imprisoned Orphans: Community Archaeology at Children’s Village, Manzanar War Relocation Center

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There were ten War Relocation Centers established during World War II to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese American citizens and immigrants, but only one had an orphanage. Manzanar's “Children’s Village” housed 101 orphans, from newborns to teenagers. The entire mass incarceration was unconstitutional, tragic, costly, and unnecessary, but imprisoning orphans seems especially egregious. Now Manzanar is a National Historic Site, designated to preserve and interpret cultural resources associated with this history. A recent Community Archaeology Project, funded by a former orphan, uncovered features and artifacts that shed light on the lives of the orphans and the absurdity of their incarceration. By removing vegetation and flood deposits, the project turned an overgrown thicket into a commemorative space. Today, the public can visit the Children’s Village site to learn about and contemplate one small example of the consequences of government actions motivated by racism, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35847.0