TULELAKE, Calif. — Visit here today and you will find a spot that is more field than town, a place where arrow-straight highways pierce plantings of potatoes and onions.
It is small, with a population of about 1,000 — many descended from 19th century pioneers.
It is also remote — hugging California 139 in the austerely beautiful Modoc Plateau, known for craggy outcroppings of ancient lava. The nearest interstate is 77 miles away; the nearest major commercial airport, more than 100.
Its isolation led the U.S. government to choose it as the location for the largest and most punitive of its World War II-era Japanese internment camps.
Japanese-Americans deemed “disloyal” were sent to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, the only one of the 10 camps with a stockade and jail.
At its peak, it housed nearly 19,000 people, making it the most populous California settlement north of Sacramento. (Among them: future “Star Trek” actor George Takei.)
“It was like a city,” said Angela Sutton, a fourth-generation Tulelake native who works as a ranger for the National Park Service, which manages what’s left of the camp.
“There were 300 people to a block, 28 bathrooms to a block — people were really jammed in there.”
Today, little remains of the internment center — a few building foundations, a handful of weathered barracks and the chilly jail — that was spread over various sites around Tulelake.
This includes the Tule Lake Segregation Center, where tens of thousands of people were held, as well as Camp Tulelake, an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp that served as an early detention center for Japanese-American resisters, and later for German and Italian prisoners of war.
“Our mandate is to tell the story of Japanese-Americans at Tule Lake,” said Larry Whalon, who oversees the Tule Lake site — one of a series of park service units that commemorate World War II in the Pacific — as well as the nearby Lava Beds National Monument.
“But we also need to tell the other stories too: What the place was like before, the story of the Native Americans, the story of the lake, of agriculture, of the people who lived there, the stories that came after.
“All of those stories give context.”
It’s a story that the rangers at Manzanar National Historic Site, California’s other Japanese-American interment camp, in the Owens Valley, about 220 miles north of Los Angeles, have been developing for more than two decades.
That site, a square-mile park within view of Mount Whitney, contains robust displays on the incarceration experience that include audio of oral histories with survivors.
“It’s a history that is still alive,” said Alisa Lynch, Manzanar’s longtime chief of interpretation. “We can connect with people who experienced it. It’s a history that is relevant today.”
“Relevant” is a word you’ll hear a lot of at Tule Lake and Manzanar:
Sutton said it’s a story worth examining.
“We take a dark spot in our own history, something other countries might want to cover up,” she said, “and we maintain it and preserve it so that future generations can learn.”
A journey to Tule Lake couldn’t be timelier.
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