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Photo by United States National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Photo by United States National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Photo by United States National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Photo by United States National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Photo by U.S. National Park Service, restoration/cleanup by National Park Maps (https://npmaps.com) via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Photo by sonora ortiz via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photo by sonora ortiz via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photo by sonora ortiz via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Background
The Poston Internment Camp, located in Yuma County (now in La Paz County) in southwestern Arizona, was the largest (in terms of area) of the 10 American concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority during World War II.
The site was composed of three separate camps arranged in a chain from north to south, three miles from each other. Internees named the camps Roasten, Toastin, and Dustin, based on their desert locations. The Colorado River was about 3 miles (4.8 km) to the west, outside of the camp perimeter.
Poston was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, over the objections of the Tribal Council, who refused to be a part of doing to others what had been done to their tribe. Army commanders and officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, though, overruled the council, seeing the opportunity to improve infrastructure and agricultural development (which would remain after the war and aid the reservation's permanent population) on the War Department budget and with thousands of "volunteers".
Pearl Mitsu Sonoda (May 17, 1918 â March 4, 2015), was an American ichthyologist and biologist who was interned with her family in an American War Relocation Center during World War II because they had Japanese heritage.
