Hundreds of advocates returned to Oklahoma’s Fort Sill this past weekend to continue denouncing the Trump administration’s plan to reuse the base as a prison camp for as many as 1,400 migrant children. Among the peaceful demonstrators who shut down the entrance were Japanese American survivors of U.S. internment camps and Native American activists who commemorated the indigenous people who were once imprisoned—and died—at Fort Sill.
“Fort Sill has a long history here in Oklahoma,” said United We Dream’s Daniela Melendez. “It used to be a place where Native Americans were held after the Trail of Tears and also keeping them as, like, prisoners, basically. And also, Japanese Americans have also had a long history here, as they were also in detention camps during World War II. And now we’re seeing that Fort Sill is going to become a detention center for children of immigrants who are seeking asylum.”
Last month, a smaller group of Japanese American elders protested outside Fort Sill, where they were ridiculed by a U.S. military officer but remained undeterred. “Seventy-five years ago, 120,000 of us were removed from our homes and forcefully incarcerated in prison camps across the country,” Dr. Satsuki Ina, an internment camp survivor, said. “We are here today to protest the repetition of history.”
Dr. Ina returned to Fort Sill this past weekend, now accompanied by a huge coalition of hundreds of activists. “We will not allow history to repeat itself with a concentration camp for immigrant children,” said Dream Action Oklahoma leader Brenda Lozano. “Generations of Japanese, Native American, and Black people have all been hurt by Fort Sill.”
Advocates also focused on pressuring Gov. Kevin Stitt not to collaborate with mass deportation agencies, NBC News reported, with advocates flooding social media to demand that a site that already has a dark history should not be reused to jail children. “We must defund these out-of-control agencies and shut down this system of hate and human cages,” said Stosh Cotler of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action.
Advocates carried with them paper cranes (“tsuru” in Japanese) folded by Americans all across the country. They’d previously been displayed outside the migrant family jail in Dilley, Texas.“The story of the crane as symbol of nonviolence and human love is a uniquely Japanese cultural story,” Mike Ishii of the New York Day of Remembrance told NBC News at the time, “and we want to bring it to this struggle.”
“’This is not who we are’ is belied by the history of the military base,” University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law professor Mari Matsuda writes. “Located on the plains to impose order in a time of settler ascendency, Fort Sill presided over the displacement of native people. The great Apache chief Geronimo and families from his tribe were imprisoned for years at Fort Sill—the first instance of child incarceration there.”
“We plan to expand our efforts in the future—and return to Ft. Sill if Oklahoma’s governor ignores demands to prevent the caging of children here,” Tsuru For Solidarity, an advocacy group of Japanese Americans fighting against family separation, said. The group’s site asks us to listen: “This pain of family and community fracturing is our lived experience, history, and inheritance. We know what happens when people are rounded up and imprisoned in ‘detention centers.’ We speak from our past with all the weight of our community’s experience to say: stop repeating history.”