Photos: The forgotten internment

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An umiak, loaded with people, at shoreline with two rowboats alongside at the Ward Lake Evacuation Camp, Killisnoo, ca. 1942.

UNALASKA -- All of the survivors remember the trees. The towering hemlocks and the Sitka spruce; the scrubby shore pines and the leafy alders. "I used to look at them in schoolbooks," a woman recalled, 71 years after she first saw them. She'd found the trees interesting in the books. But she felt trapped once she stood beneath their branches.

She had come — they had all come — from their treeless islands, against their will, to this rainy slice of dense, damp forest, wedged between mountains and ocean. The Second World War had stormed the Aleutians, a far-flung string of islands in southwest Alaska. Japanese bombs had fallen on Dutch Harbor, and Japanese troops occupied the westernmost islands in the chain. And so the United States government had brought their Native occupants, the Aleuts, to a handful of makeshift camps in the coastal rainforest of the Alaskan panhandle to wait out the inferno. The trees, more than anything, represented the strangeness and terror of their sudden relocation.

The evacuation was prompted partly by a sense of paternal benevolence and responsibility but was conditioned by racist attitudes. It would result in three years of suffering and the death of more than a tenth of the Aleuts in the camps. Afterwards, life on the islands would never quite revert back to its previous stability: Alcoholism would take hold, and some villages would never be repopulated. It would be decades before the haunted survivors told their stories.

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