Transpacific Heritage Politics: Preserving Former Confinement Landscapes in Hawaiʻi, British Columbia, and Alaska

In this dissertation, I study heritage politics at Pacific war landscapes in the aftermath of forced relocation and unjust incarceration. I center my focus on the contemporary spatial and racial politics of war commemoration at three former Second World War confinement (or internment) landscapes in former outlying US territories in Hawaiʻi and Alaska and in western Canada. These include: 1) Honouliuli Prisoner of War and Internment Camp in Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, which incarcerated prisoners-of-war from Asia and the Pacific and unjustly incarcerated select Hawaiʻi Japanese and German civilians; (2) Tashme Internment Camp in Sunshine Valley and a network of road labor camps in Interior British Columbia, Canada, which confined Japanese-Canadian families removed from the province’s coast; and (3) Funter Bay near Juneau, Southeast Alaska, which held forcibly relocated Alaska Native or Unangax̂ from the Pribilof Islands. A relational reading of these transpacific former confinement landscapes exposes critical distinctions in American and Canadian wartime histories and in subsequent intergenerational social movements for redress and symbolic reparations. I argue that heritage designation processes fundamentally alter land tenure and reshape the contemporary material and environmental conditions of these sites located on occupied land (in Hawaiʻi), unceded land (in British Columbia), and contested land (in Alaska). This dissertation intervenes in debates in landscape history, critical heritage studies, infrastructure studies, and Asian-Indigenous relations in the Pacific. It unsettles landscape preservation discourses which remain object-oriented and predicated on regimes of property, ownership, and expertise. The dissertation upends old ideas about war reparations and considers Asian North American (namely, Japanese American, and Japanese Canadian) populations’ and Indigenous (Kānaka Maoli, Coast Salish, Unangax̂, and Tlingit) peoples’ variable relations to land, war/militarism, and colonialism(s) in a trans-local, hemispheric context. Ultimately, this dissertation considers how processes of heritage preservation can be better oriented towards a politics of restitution of land in settler colonial contexts, given intersectional histories of dispossession and forced removal across the non-contiguous US and in western Canada.

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