American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the summer of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Attu and the bombing of American military forces at Dutch Harbor began the only military campaign of World War II fought on North American soil. The bloody battles that ensued, the ordeals of the soldiers, and the eventual American triumph in the Aleutian Islands have been well documented. Yet the tragic consequences of the American military presence for the aboriginal people of the islands has been largely ignored. After the Japanese attacks, the government took steps to protect the island's inhabitants by ordering the evacuation of all Aleuts west of Unimak Island. (See figure 1.) There was good reason to fear for the Aleutian Island residents, since forty-two Aleuts had been taken prisoner from Attu and would end up in Japanese concentration camps in Hokkaido. However, in trying to protect them, government officials took Aleuts from their ancestral homeland and denied their freedom, placing them in camps unfit for human habitation fifteen hundred miles from their home. Not only did this disastrous policy strip the Aleuts of their basic human rights; it caused the death of 10 percent of their number. More than 880 Aleuts taken were placed haphazardly in abandoned fish canneries on the mainland without proper medical treatment or adequate food. When the Aleuts finally returned home at the end of the war, their houses had been ransacked by American military personnel and their Russian Orthodox churches and icons and personal possessions had been looted.