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Entangled histories of land and labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20th century

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Entangled histories of land and labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20th century

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Content ENTANGLED HISTORIES OF LAND AND LABOR ON THE YAKAMA RESERVATION IN THE 20 TH CENTURY By Yesenia Navarrete Hunter A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (HISTORY) August 2022 Copyright, 2022 Yesenia Navarrete Hunter ii Epígrafe/Epigraph Reconocimiento de la tierra: En mi trabajo y en mi vida, honro y reconozco a la gente de la Nación Yakama que, desde tiempos inmemoriales, ha cuidado, se ha asociado y administrado la tierra, la montaña Pahto, y los ríos de su región. Se preocupan por sus mayores, niños y idiomas. Y son defensores de las mujeres, niñas y personas indígenas desaparecidas y asesinadas. Reconocimiento laboral: La región ha sido moldeada por la labor de familias y niños indígenas, negros, marrones, inmigrantes y migrantes, quienes han moldeado la tierra hasta el rico paisaje agrícola que es hoy. Land acknowledgement: In my work and in my life I honor and acknowledge the people of the Yakama Nation who since time before memory have cared for, partnered with, and stewarded the land, Pahto, and the rivers of their region. They care for their elders, children, and language and are advocates for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, girls, and people. Labor acknowledgement: The region has been shaped by the labor of Indigenous, black, brown, immigrant, and migrant families and children, who have shaped the land to the rich agricultural landscape that it is today. iii Dedicación/Dedication: Dedico este trabajo a mi madre y a mi padre quienes me trajeron de México a una tierna edad en un intento de darle a nuestra familia las mejores oportunidades para el futuro. Dedico este trabajo a mi Yo Histórico que nunca imaginó que sería un historiador profesional. Dedico este trabajo a mi esposo e hijos quienes me han mostrado amor sin deudas y apoyo incansable. Dedico este trabajo a los trabajadores que luchan con la tierra para construir una vida mejor para ellos y sus familias. Dedico este trabajo a lo gente del Valle de Yakima y la Reserva Yakama cuyas historias llevo con gratitud. Y finalmente, dedico este trabajo a la tierra que ha sido desde tiempo inmemorial el lugar de las bandas y tribus ahora reconocidas como la Nacion Yakama. Este lugar informa mi trabajo y me vincula con pasados, presencias y futuros. I dedicate this work to my mother and father who brought me from Mexico at a tender age in attempts to give our family the best chances for the future. I dedicate this work to my Historical Self that never imagined I would be a professional historian. I dedicate this work to my husband and children who have shown me love without debt and unrelenting support. I dedicate this work to the laborers who struggle with the land to build a better life for themselves and their families. I dedicate this work to the peoples of the Yakima Valley and the Yakama Reservation whose stories I carry with gratitude. And finally, I dedicate this work to the land that has been since time before memory the place of the bands and tribes now recognized as the Yakama people. This Place informs my work and links me to pasts, presence, and futures. iv Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge the support of my family: my husband and best friend Israel James Hunter and our children, Tait Garcia, Amaris Hunter, Deja Hunter, Aeden Hunter, and Ellah Hunter. They have motivated and supported me throughout this process, and I am forever grateful. My entrance into scholarship started with meeting women in academia doing community work. This has foregrounded my academic endeavors and has helped me to “saber como llegar” as a scholar in community spaces. Martha Gonzalez, Michelle Habell-Pallan, Iris Viveros, Monica DeLaTorre, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Carrie Lanza, Angelica Macklin, and Monica Rojas have been a constant source of support and inspiration and they’ve helped me carve out spaces of belonging in the academic world. I couldn’t have done this work without the support from my mentors and advisers at the University of Southern California including my dissertation advisor George Sanchez, and committee members, Peter Mancall, Natalia Molina, and Martha Gonzalez. I couldn’t have made my place in academia without the support of Nayan Shah, Karen Halttunen, Lon Kurashige, Paul Lerner, Amy Braden, Bill Deverell, and Sean Fraga. I’m so grateful for the work and support of the USC History Program staff including Lori Rogers, Simone Bessant, and Sandra Hopwood. I’m indebted to my friends and colleagues at USC including Jillaine Cook, Laura Dominguez, Dan Wallace, Gary Stein, Jordan Keagle, and Stan Fonseca who read a lot of my work and kept up a weekly check in especially during the pandemic. I’m also grateful for the support from the Boyle Heights Museum Team that includes Jorge Leal, Michelle Vasquez, Cassandra Flores-Montano, Rosa Noriega-Rocha, Alexander Polt-Gifford, and the many graduate and undergraduate students in the project. I am forever grateful for the Seattle v Fandango Project, and friends and community from the Yakima Valley who have loved and supported the full me. Writing a dissertation during the pandemic would not have been possible without the advocacy and support of librarians and archives. I’m so grateful for librarians and their staff who scanned images and sent files and responded with hope and reassurance. This includes the awesome help I got from Gayle O’Hara at Washington State University and Daniel Liestman at Heritage University. I am so thankful for the colleagues at Heritage University who have supported my intellectual curiosities since I entered their hallways in 2014. This includes my friends and mentors Blake Slonecker, Winona Winn, Mary James, Gloria Jones-Dance, Corey Hodge, and so many more. I also want to think the organizations and committees that granted funding that made my research and writing possible. This includes the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Social Science Research Council (once a Mellon, always a Mellon!), and the University of Southern California that offered generous opportunities for research fellowships. Specifically, I want to thank the East Asian Studies Center which granted a fellowship for the research and writing of the Japanese experience. I am also grateful for the support of the Humanities and the University of the Future Fellowship which afforded me the opportunity to work closely with Natalia Molina, Amy Braden, Peter Mancall. This fellowship allowed me to explore administrative work to better support my students. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Bringing Theory to Practice, PLACE Collaborative where I’ve been able to work with David Scobey, Kate Griffin, and Todd Rosendahl and all the projects across the nation working to Listen closely in and with community. I’m especially grateful that this project brought me in vi relationship with colleagues such as Jack Tchen who offered advice and feedback on some of my work. And finally, I want to acknowledge that much of my motivation comes from the love and experience of being part of a large extended family: my in-laws Cecilia and Doug Martin, and my own Marquez Family: my parents Alberto Marquez Rojero and Guadalupe Navarrete Marquez; my siblings: Jose Marquez, Maria Marquez, Luis Marquez, Angel Marquez, Beto Marquez, Angel Marquez, Nena Rodriguez, Noel Marquez, Raul Marquez, Blanca Estela Marquez, Eva Mohorovich, Yolanda DeLeon, Mik Maria Gloria Armijo, Gina Perez, Jim Marquez, Belle Vargas, and all of their beautiful families. Their love, friendship and support are incomparable. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Epígrafe/Epigraph ............................................................................................................................ ii Dedicación/Dedication ................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... viii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ x Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Part 1: Yakama Place and Movement and the Repertoire of Refusal ............................................. 5 Chapter 1: Reserved .......................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 2: Removal ........................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 3: Refusal ............................................................................................................. 61 Conclusion: Remain .......................................................................................................... 75 Part 2: Crafting Place ..................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 4: Fragility of Space ............................................................................................. 84 Chapter 5: Ordering Neighbor and Labor ....................................................................... 107 Chapter 6: Permanence of Desire .................................................................................... 141 Conclusion: Crafting Place .............................................................................................. 159 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 166 viii List of Figures Figure 1: “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” Yakima Valley Museum ............................................................................................ 7 Figure 2, A map of Washington State noting the Ceded Area (about 12 million acres) and the Yakama Reservation (1.2 million acres) online source ...................................................... 10 Figure 3: Letter from H. Price, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to R.H. Milroy regarding the Indians who “persistently refuse to obey your order to return” to the reservation, Yakima Valley Museum ............................................................................................................. 28 Figure 4: Letter from HB Miller to Lucy James on July 2, 1920, offering to process a lease or purchase her land. There is no information as to how Miller knew that James had received a Fee Patent. Lucullus McWhorter files. .................................................................... 53 Figure 5:“Yakima Indian family,” A Yakama woman, two children, four wa’paas, and a cat. ................................................................................................................................................... 61 Figure 6: A letter from Hattie Purns Hoptowit (and 426 others) to the Senate committee in 1951. ......................................................................................................................................... 74 Figure 7: Three men syncopate the drop of their kine onto the steaming mound of rice. Three boys await their turn. Trays of rice steam behind them. A woman walks past the window in the house. ................................................................................................................. 78 Figure 8: A man works on his alfalfa farm, Yakama Reservation, circa 1930s. ....................... 97 Figure 9: “Farmhouse in Wapato. When the lease expired, they dragged the house by horse or truck and moved it to newly leased land. .............................................................................. 102 Figure 10: Neighbors came together to rebuild the Mizuta’s house after a house fire. Circa 1941 on the Yakama Reservation. ............................................................................................. 103 Figure 11: Mathew Tomaskin points to the checkerboard map of the Yakama Reservation in his office. Tomaskin works for the Legislative and Public Affairs at the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation of the Yakama Reservation. ..................................... 112 Figure 12: Japanese family poses in front of their vehicle, circa 1930. Sundquist Libraries, Yakima Valley Museum. ............................................................................................................ 117 Figure 13: Japanese children play with their neighbors. Yakima Valley Museum. .................. 117 Figure 14: Girls dressed in traditional clothing stand in front of the Yakima Buddhist Church in Wapato, Washington, ca. 1940. Yakima Valley Museum. ........................................ 117 Figure 15: The sumu wrestling team pose for a photograph in the Japanese Association Building. Yakima Valley Museum. ............................................................................................. 118 ix Figure 16: Japanese women sit at the Wapato City Park on April 26, 1936. They are eating food with chopsticks. Yakima Valley Museum ........................................................................... 118 Figure 17: Girls take a turn on the relay race at the Wapato City Park, April 26, 1936. Yakima Valley Museum. ............................................................................................................ 118 Figure 18: Japanese community members pose in front of a float covered in hop vines with a sign that reads, “Local Japanese.” Yakima Valley Museum. ................................................ 119 Figure 19: Japanese community members participate in the downtown Yakima parade. ........ 120 Figure 20: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. ............... 121 Figure 21: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. ............... 121 Figure 22: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. ............... 121 Figure 23: Yoshiko Ueda working on a farm she ran with her husband in Wapato. When her husband passed away in 1932, she asked a broker to market her crops, but he never paid her. “I took my children and moved from Wapato to Spokane.” Image caption reads, “Issei mamas worked in this style.” ........................................................................................................................................................ 124 Figure 24: “Port of Anacortes Japanese Ship,” circa 1934, unknown photographer, Anacortes, Washington. Image of export ship from Japan docked at Washington’s coast. ..... 144 Figure 25: Taichi Fujimoto farming in Wapato, Washington, circa 1927. .............................. 146 Figure 26: The Bussei Kaikan, under construction. Circa 1938. 157 ...................................... 158 Figure 27: Fukuda and her watch. “Embroidery Class,” at Minidoka concentration camp, Idaho, circa 1943. From left to right: Mrs. Okita, Mrs. Torii, Mrs. Hatsue Fukuda (teacher), Mrs. Matsuda, Mrs. Hamada, and Mrs. Iwashita. Hatsue Fukuda wearing a watch, “I carried this watch with me everywhere.” .................................................................................. 163 Figure 28: The Bussei Kaikan, still incomplete but in use, 1940, Wapato, Washington. ......... 165 x Abstract My dissertation, Entangled Histories of Land and Labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20 th century, is an examination of the impact of immigration and settlement on Indigenous people of the Yakama Reservation. I analyze photographs, family and epistolary archives, court documents, and newspapers to create a rich account of the interactions between settlers, immigrants- with a special focus on the Japanese and Mexican immigrant experience- and the Indigenous people of the Yakama Reservation in Central Washington State. 1 Introduction Entangled Histories of Land and Labor on the Yakama Reservation is about the concurrent and braided histories of immigrants, settlers, and Native Americans from Allotment to the 1940s and the impact of settlement on Indigenous people. This work is also about disentangling the Mexican and Mexican American experience from settler colonialism to examine complacency, inheritance of settler status, and belonging. This is an important time frame as Indigenous land was being shaped by the labor and interactions of immigrants and settlers into an agricultural landscape. The settler colonial actors’ aim to order neighbor and labor is on full display in this time with their strategies being put to work in the social and everyday life, and in the political and legal realm. In this project I set out to answer questions about dislocations and place-making and to interrogate questions about immigrant complacency with settler colonialism. I developed these questions based on my own experience as an immigrant and migrant farmworker: experiences that produce dislocations even if the reasons for the experiences are obscured. My parents brought our family from Mexico to the United States when I was three years old, then again when I was five. My life has been marked with rhythms of movement, dislocation, place-making, and labor and my scholarly questions have risen from my yearning to understand relational connections to people and the earth. One of the few ways to survive in the Yakima Valley, and the reason for our parents having chosen this region for living, is the opportunities to work in agriculture. Since we were a large undocumented, immigrant family, we came to Valley and entered the agricultural labor force, though summer work for families was limited in the region. The same year that my parents bought a house in Wapato, a small town on the Yakama Reservation, was the same year our neighbors invited us to travel to Skagit Valley to work in the 2 summer harvest. It was 1983 and we had been in the Valley for about three years working in agricultural labor. As a family we had been picking asparagus every spring but an invitation to find family work during the summer seemed like a good move. Labor and migrancy complicated the feelings of rupture and dislocation. As a dislocated immigrant and farmworker, I worked alongside my family in the fields and had no inclination to understand the place that I grew up in. The ruptures of immigrating to the United States, then exasperated by migrancy, were obscured by labor. In other words, I did not feel or understand, nor could I listen to be able to articulate the ruptures because the energy upon arriving to the Yakima Valley were aimed at survival and competition. This state of being warps time and leaves little room for critique of the systems and rhythms that are at play. It wasn’t until I was in a time of my life in which the urgency of survival and the feelings of scarcity were no longer immediate in my life that I was able to reflect on this condition. The catalyst for emerging from that state of being was practicing community music from Mexico where I experienced a sense of convivencia-or belonging, which I recognized as the antidote or solution for dislocations. This connection changed my perspective and desire for connecting with place. I decided to interview my parents and wondered if the distance between the years had brought about new perspectives. I was surprised to hear my father’s story placed in the cornfields of his childhood rather than the orchards of the Yakima Valley: I realized my sense of time was also impacted by dislocation. That conversation, the first of many that I’ve since had with my parents, has shaped my understanding of space, time and dislocation, and has spurred my scholarly questions. It was the spaces of belonging that we built through practice and music that encouraged me to explore more of the history of place. My intention is not to over romanticize this process, but rather to 3 emphasize that community engaged music was the impetus for theorizing about space, place, and rhythms. I set this part of my own story to explain how I, a Mexicana-now a naturalized citizen of the United States- a first generation college student, a mother, the first amongst my sixteen siblings to earn a BA, MA, and now a PhD, came to my historical questions. It was because I had walked around with these questions in my body. The questions stemmed from the same dislocation of migration, movement, and labor and as an adult I realized these were not simply place-based dislocations, but a fracture in my connection to what I’ve come to call, my Historical Self. I describe the Historical Self as the self that contains the cultural and ancestral; as such, it both complicates and informs who I am today despite feelings of disconnections. I realized that connecting to the historic was also about reckoning with my presence here on Indigenous land as an uninvited guest. My personal questions became the historical questions I know ask of my work: How do people make place in fragile spaces? How does the place-making activities and settlement impact Indigenous peoples? Do Mexicans and Chicanos inherit settler status? To answer these questions, I employ the theoretical frameworks that center relationality and the everyday life experiences to tell these braided histories of Indigenous people, settlers, immigrants, and migrants. I use Henri Lefebvre’s theories of rhythmanalysis and focus on the intersection of space, time, and energy to find the ways that immigrants set down new patterns to make place despite racial exclusions and labor limitations they encountered. 1 I lean on Diana Taylor’s work on performance, taking heed and reading performance alongside the archives. 2 1 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004). 2 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 4 This helps me to center the actions of non-white actors along with traditional archives to view responses to settler logics. The histories of settlers, immigrants, and labor cannot be told without Indigenous people nor without engaging with questions of sovereignty, settler colonialism, and decolonization. In chapter one I look at how Indigenous people demonstrated their unwillingness to submit fully to the settler colonial logics of shaping the reservation land into an agricultural landscape. By centering the myriad of responses of Indigenous people to the settler logics and actions, I find stories of refusal. 3 The stories, when taken together, reveal a repertoire of refusal that speaks something different than resistance and offers a fuller view of the impact of colonization on Indigenous people of the Yakama Nation. In chapter two I focus on the rhythms of place-making that the Japanese immigrants used to create new spaces in the highly racialized social spaces. I analyze the relationality of their position on the reservation triangulated with white farmers and Indigenous people that made their futures precarious. In the relationships that Indigenous people built with Japanese immigrants I find that Yakama people were able to bypass the logics of settler colonialism to keep a hold of decolonized practices. 3 I want to thank my colleague Sean Fraga who pointed me to the important scholarship on refusal by anthropologist Audra Simpson. See Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, (Duke University Press, 2014). 5 Part 1: Yakama Place and Movement and the Repertoire of Refusal A rider approached the families dwelling near Rock Creek on the Columbia River. It was the fall of 1880, and the skies were gray; the cold air swept up the banks of the river to the family dwellings. By November, the Indians of the Plateau had settled into their winter spaces, having completed their movement and migrations that would sustain them through the winter. The rider was a representative from the Yakama Indian Agency at Fort Simcoe. He would have traveled a day’s journey and had arrived there to count the Indians for the census. Rock Creek is located on the Washington side of the Columbia River about 100 miles from the Yakama Reservation and on ceded land. The visitor’s aim was to collect names and information on the Indians residing outside of the Yakama Reservation. If the enumerator was Charles C. Olney, the same person who counted the Yakama Indians residing on the reservation, then like his half-brother George Washington Olney, Charles may have known the language so that he could explain what his business was. Throughout the fall of 1880 Olney had been tasked with enumerating the Tenth Census of the United States Indian Division and had documented Indians living on and off the reservation. The enumerator made only a simple note at his encounter with Indians living there. “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” then documented the total number near Rock Creek, Pine Creek and throughout: a total of 276. What the interactions between these groups of Indians and the enumerator looked or sounded like is lost to time and place. Only the ancestors know what it means that they had refused to give the enumerator any details. Did they turn their backs, sidestep the conversation, outright refuse with language that sent the enumerator away? What is significant is the detail we 6 have left from these encounters: that they refused, that they were unwilling to give any information worthy to be jotted down in the enumerator’s notes. 4 4 Though the author of this document is unknown I believe that this document was created by Charles C. Olney who had conducted the Tenth Census of the United States, Indian Division that were submitted to the US Department of the Interior. The handwriting of the census records that bear his name is very similar to this document and they were recorded in the same region, from the same office in 1880. I thank my colleagues Jordan Keagle and Stan Fonseca for their assistance in reviewing the handwriting on these documents. Charles C. Olney is an important historical figure in the history of the Yakama Nation as he is the son of Nathan Olney who was a white man, pioneer to Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s who established the Olney family with an Indian woman of Warm Springs. Nathan Hale Olney married several women and had numerous children; Charles C. Olney was one of the children that Nathan had with Ehathinish. Nathan Hale Olney was the first sheriff of The Dalles, Oregon, and his close friend, James Wilbur was the first police officer. When Wilbur was appointed as school director at the Fort Simcoe (and later as Indian Agent/superintendent) he invited Nathan Olney to move the reservation and apply for allotments through his Indian wife and children. See George W. Olney, “Story of James H. Wilbur as the Yakima Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe-transcript,” June 1951, Yakima Memory, Digital Repository, accessed 12/11/2020, and, Author Unknown, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” in Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records (1848- 1904). 7 Figure 1: Pages 1 and 2, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” Listing the count of Indigenous people at or near Rock Creek with a total number of 276 who were not counted in the 1880 census sheets. 5 5 Author Unknown, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” in Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records (1848-1904). 8 The census of 1880 was taken 25 years after the signing of the Yakama Nation treaty. The treaty with the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation was signed by the leaders of 14 bands and tribes and Governor Isaac Stevens in 1855. The bands and tribes that signed the treaty in 1855 were fourteen different groups that came to be named the Yakama Nation. The fourteen tribes and bands are the Kah-milpah, Ocne-chotes, Pabuse, Wenatchapam, Klickitat, Pesquose, See-ap-cat, Yakama, Klinquit, Shyiks, Sk’in-pah, Kow-was-say-ee, Li-ay-was, and the Wish- ham. When I refer to the Yakama, I am referring to the people categorized under the fourteen tribes and bands. 6 The ceded region is approximately 12 million acres of land throughout what we know now as Washington State, and the reserved region is about 1.2 million acres of land. It took four years for Congress to ratify the treaty but only a few short months for Stevens to advertise open land for white settlers. A short-lived and mostly unfruitful gold rush brought settlers into and through the region as early as 1856. The people of the region are characterized as semi-nomadic, and since time immemorial have seasonally moved and made their home in various locations based on foods and practices. The ceded region has been utilized for dwelling, cultural practices, living, and hunting and fishing. As movers, they make place through movement and practice in multiple locations: they moved, dwelt, and had their being in the various places throughout the 12 million acres of land in 6 A note on terminology: Following Indigenous scholars I use the term Indian when referring to Indigenous people in what is now known as the United States. When I can I refer to the tribal affiliation by name. I use the term Indigenous with a capital “I” following Indigenous scholars desire and intent to show respect for Indigenous identity. I do not fully spell out sq—w, but again, following Indigenous scholars, indicate with dashes the violence and obscenity the term connotes. “Treaty and Tribal Reference,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 106, No. 3 (2005): 352-355, accessed May 25, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20615554. See treaty signature page. 9 the ceded region. 7 Shrinking their geographical reach would mean limiting the life practices and the connection to place that had been established through their customary practices. Though the reservation was intended to fix people in place and limit contact with white settlers, Indigenous people had other ideas for their lives and futures. Because of the importance of place to their life ways, the signers used the treaty to lay claim to continual access to the ceded land. In article three of the treaty the signers maintained the exclusive right to fish, to erect temporary buildings for curing fish, to hunt, and to gather roots and berries in all the “usual and accustomed places.” In other words, they claimed a continued and unending connection to place throughout the region that had been utilized for provisions, for hunting, gathering, and dwelling. As such, the Yakama leaders negotiated their continued and uninterrupted connection to place and, to be clear, did not negotiate their culture, language, or practices. 8 The treaty document was a meeting place between whites and Indians that became the common language each group used to understand the claims and rights of one another. Indigenous people, to this day, use the language of the treaty to claim their continual access to place. 9 7 See map, Figure 2. 8 Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855, Article 3. 9 I first heard this language in a conversation with a Yakama enrolled woman, Marilee Smunitee Jones, and her mother. We were standing at Wildridge Winery in Naches, a city located in the ceded land, overlooking the hills and towards Mt. Pahto when Marilee explained that there were areas nearby that they could dig in if they could access it because it was a site in their “usual and customary places.” Marilee Smunitee Jones, interview with author, Yakima, 2017. 10 Figure 2, A map of Washington State noting the Ceded Area (about 12 million acres) and the Yakama Reservation (1.2 million acres). 10 Scholars have looked at Indigenous peoples’ claim to continuity and response to colonialism through a framework of resistance and have characterized the aim to preserve culture as a sign of resiliency. Moreover, reservation history of the Yakama Nation has been analyzed through the longstanding political and resource struggles such as the fishing wars that were heightened in the 1960s and 1970s. These issues continue to be sites of resistance where Indigenous people fight the unjust infringements on their treaty rights and sovereignty. 11 Here, I 10 Map, Yakama Nation, Department of Natural Resources, accessed 10/1/2019, https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/15_yn_wdfw_final_june_13_2020.pdf. 11 Some scholarly works on the Yakama people and reservation life: Clifford E. Trafzer, Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian 11 will identify some ways that Indigenous people maintained sovereignty while facing acts of removal and attempts of dislocation in the early 20 th century. In this chapter I address the impacts of colonization on the everyday life of Indigenous peoples in the early 20th century. With that in mind, I’ve divided this chapter into four parts, Reserved, Removal, Refusal, and Remain, to unfold a temporal and spatial perspective on Indigenous response in the early 20th century. In this introduction, I call to remembrance that Indigenous people Reserved the land of the reservation and that it was not gifted or granted to Indigenous people. 12 Indigenous people made a move to include language in the treaty to reserve the exclusive right to follow their customs and practices “at all usual and accustomed places,” which gave them continual and uninterrupted access to the region. This is an important reminder in understanding how Indigenous people view and value land which stands in contrast to the settler colonial logics and the tactics of settlers in their efforts to remove Indigenous people from their land. Moreover, foregrounding this fact helps us link the American Indian experience to modern history as it relates to paternalism that has characterized settler and Indigenous interactions. In the section, Removal, I look at the efforts of removal that come from different levels of society. I start by discussing Indian Policy that aimed to dispossess and detribalize Indigenous people and the impact this had on land. I discuss the role that the Indian Agents and white Reservation, 1888-1964, (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1997); and works on cultural resilience and revival come from Yakama women scholars such as Michelle M. Jacobs, Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); and Virginia R. Beavert, and Janne L. Underriner, The Gift of Knowledge/ Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imami: Reflections on Sahaptin Ways, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). 12 Indigenous people have centered this language in life and in advocacy. Also see Robert J. Miller, “American Indian Treaty Glossary,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 106, no. 3 (2005), page 490. 12 settlers played both directly and indirectly, in the process of dispossession. I look at Indian Agency employees such as Harry .B. Miller, who was fired from the agency for dealing with Indian land, illegally selling maps of surplus land to his network of capitalists, and for giving inside information to his business partners. 13 Upon his dismissal from the agency in 1913 he was hired by H.M. Gilbert at the newly established Central Bank in Toppenish, Washington and within a year and under the care of the bank opened the Reservation Investment Company to keep his land business growing. 14 By the end of his life when the federal government finally caught up to him he had amassed several hundred acres of land and built a network of exploitation that benefited a few rich white men. In that network was Reese B. Brown a capitalist who dealt with and/or benefited from others dealing in Indian land. Brown benefited from his friendship with Miller and others in the region who preyed on vulnerable Indigenous people to gain their land. I examine these relationships and their interactions with Indigenous people through a view of the settler colonial logics- logics of dispossession and removal, with tactics such as cultural and language genocide, boarding and residential schools aimed at de- indigenizing children, and the continued efforts to remove Indigenous people from their land. By examining this network, I show a gradation of power and the white settler use of power to remove Indigenous people. These stories expose gender dynamics and paternalism that continue to underscore relationships on the reservation. 13 Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate, Seventieth Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to S. Res. 79, Part 1, Yakima, Washington and Klamath Falls, Oregon, November 12, 13, and 16, 1928, US Government Printing office, 1929, page, 120. 14 Miller had leases in the names of Mr. Cantrill, Don Trimble (bank employee), Samuel Miller (his father), Fred Houghton (his brother in law), and the Reservation Investment Company. Woodhouse testimony in, US Senate, Hearings, 1928, pp 19-21. 13 In the section, Repertoire of Refusal, I look at Indigenous responses to the settler colonial logics that were ordering life and labor on the Yakama Reservation. Refusal gives us a fuller view of interactions from different points of view and allows us to discern the entanglements and relationships Indigenous people had with various groups of people. I introduce Hattie Purns Hoptowit, a Yakama woman who struggled with Brown over her land. The evidence shows a repertoire of refusal, that is, various ways that Indigenous people indicated or showed their unwillingness to do something or their unwillingness to accept or grant something from people in power around them. This approach also allows us to better understand the kinds and levels of power in the interactions. I define refusal as an act or an instance of refusing; to indicate or demonstrate that one is unwilling to do something; to be unwilling to accept or grant something; to stop short of, to go alongside something rather than to commit fully. While resistance means to withstand an act or action against oneself, it can also mean a barrier that resists, counteracts, or defeats an action. Resistance creates a binary, likened to a tug-of-war where the balance of power is between two sides and the tension is only resolved when and if one side wins. Resistance as an analytic for the evidence in this chapter is inadequate because I am looking at individual and in the moment responses to the daily rhythms of exclusion and violence. Collectively the moments amount to systemic violence but in the everyday they are produced by settlers putting to acts a colonial logic that aimed to remove Indigenous people and gain more land. 15 A relational approach as advanced by historian Natalia Molina requires us to look with more nuance at the power dynamics that are shaping the decisions and hence, the land of the reservation. Lisa Lowe, 15 For more on the scholarship on Resistance see Judith Butler, Leticia Sabsay, and Zeynep Gambetti, Vulnerability and Resistance, (Duke University Press, 2016). 14 writing about the experience of Asian immigrants reminds us that binaries limit the relational possibilities and only reinforces white supremacy since whiteness gets propped up as the standard. 16 For this reason, I chose refusal as an analytic as it allows for a relational rather than a binary approach to understanding the dynamics of power between Indigenous people and the varied groups of people with whom they interacted with. This approach allows us to see the variations in power and exposes the settler colonial logics that aimed to order neighbor and labor. As Indigenous people encountered colonial logics of displacement performed in various ways and on the stages of the varied landscape, they responded with acts of refusal that were at times collective and at times individual. These stories demonstrate the failure of settler colonialism that resulted from sovereign refusal. I use the term “repertoire” leaning on Diana Taylor’s work in The Archive and the Repertoire, and to make room for understanding the various ways that Indigenous peoples spoke back, acted out or responded to the colonial logics performed by people they interacted with, the logics aimed at ordering neighbor and labor, the logics and confining categories that meant to shape the definitions of indigenous identity and sovereignty. 17 I define repertoire as the whole body of items, skills, scripts or roles which are regularly performed as responses to the colonial project of settlement. But repertoire is not limited to performances in response to, but as acts of everyday life, therefore, it encompasses the whole body of behaviors that were habitually used, 16 Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, (California: Univ. of California Press, 2014); Natalia Molina, Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, (Duke University press, 1996). 17 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americans, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.) 15 by way of habit or custom by Indigenous people. I use repertoire to speak to the embodied and communal knowledge and practice that makes up the varied ways of refusal. Since Taylor argues that the repertoire- the community acts- collectively can speak to and with the archive, I use the stories of and by Indigenous peoples as an archive of refusal read in conversation with written archives. 18 Refusal shows up so often in the archives that I cannot ignore its importance in outlining Indigenous response to the settler colonial efforts to remove and disappear Indians. I take into consideration that the logics were practiced by white people in power and much of the interactions were in the everyday life rather than large structural or political changes although they were often aided by policy changes. The interactions help us view Indigenous response shaped in the moment and in the face of settler colonial tactics of removal. The response of refusal can then be seen as a move rather than as a strategy or a tactic because Indigenous people more often had to respond in the moment as uncoordinated and in individual interactions. Refusal then leads us to the final section in this chapter called Remain, I focus on how Indigenous people remain in control of their land and desires and in many ways, though touched by colonial logics, have managed to maintain sovereignty and some forms of uncolonized practices. I close the chapter by discussing the violent deaths of both Miller and Brown in contrast to the activism of Indigenous people with a special focus on Hattie Hoptowit who represented the Yakama Nation before Congress to advocate for her people. What can this story of refusing to be counted at Rock Creek tell us about Indigenous identity? Though we have very little information on what the interactions between the enumerator and the people looked like, we can consider this story in light of other stories. To answer this question, we must look at a repertoire of refusal, putting these acts together and 18 Taylor, 16-25. 16 reading them together with the archive to gain a fuller and more nuanced view of the textures of everyday life for Indigenous people. While resistance limits our analysis to Indigenous people stuck in a binary with politics and treaty factors, refusal helps us look at the rhythms of exclusion and land dispossession that were naturalized into the landscape. Acts of refusal can say much about the logics that were structuring land and living and point to the power hierarchies that were propped up on feelings of white paternalism that characterized white and Indigenous interactions. Refusal includes resistance and resilience and expands our view to the everyday life, the soil, and the water that nourishes it. 17 Chapter 1: Reserved Article one of the Yakama Treaty frames Indigenous people as actors ceding, relinquishing, and conveying the rights, title, and interest of the lands to the United States. It also identifies a timeline for removal of Indigenous people from the ceded region to the reservation which would be “for the exclusive use and benefit of said confederated tribes and bands of Indians.” It also ordered that “no white man, excepting those in the employment of the Indian Department,” would be permitted to live on the reservation. And furthermore, that the people of the confederated tribes and bands “agree to remove to, and settle upon, the same, within one year after the ratification of this treaty.” 19 The treaty was signed in 1855 but ratified only after the end of the Yakima War in 1859. Though article one actively gives the Indigenous people the voice to cede and relinquish parts of their ancestral lands, article two, written in a passive voice, silences the acts and rights of the indigenous people and outlines that they will be removed from the ceded areas to the reservation within one year of ratifying the treaty. The passive voice underscores the treaty boundaries, and this passive understanding of the treaty and reservation has characterized the land as something that has been given to or provided to Indians and has shaped the paternalistic view of the reservation, sovereignty, and of Indigenous identity to the current days. The ways that Indigenous people have understood the reservation as a place that they reserved for themselves makes them the actors of reserving, while the master narrative and common place knowledge positions Indigenous people as non-actors and passive receivers of a gift from a benevolent and paternalistic government that has allowed them to exist. Yakama Indigenous people insist in everyday language that their ancestors reserved the land to demonstrate a 19 The treaty was signed in 1855 and ratified in 1859. 18 continuity and uninterrupted claim to land. This is a consistent and continual reminder of their identity as sovereign people. 20 The Yakama dwelt and made their living upon an area the size of about 12 million acres. 21 The treaty reduced the living and dwelling regions to 1.2 million acres, less than 10% of their land. The bands and tribes were connected to one another through the region, through place and language, and some through customs and practices in shared places. Many were connected by family ties, kinship, and trade. 22 Article four of the treaty outlined the provisions that the US government would provide to Indigenous people, article five and seven outlined the establishment of infrastructure to aid Indigenous people in their adjustment to American life (such as the provisions of schools, furniture, books, etc. along with payment for tribal leaders) and article six preemptively planned for the possibilities of allotment. Article eight confirms the dependence that the tribes and bands have upon the US government and a promise “to be friendly with all citizens thereof.” The Yakama confirmed they would take disputes to the US Government, and in article 9, promised to keep alcohol away from the reservation. These promises signed by the treaty signers and the US Government representatives sow the seeds of paternalism on the reservation, though the feelings 20 Ethnographic notes from meeting with Smunitee Marilee Jones, June 2019. Personal records. 21 See map, Figure 2. 22 Michelle M. Jacobs, Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); and Helen Hersch Schuster, “Yakima Indian Traditionalism: A Study in Continuity and Change,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1975), 12. 19 of paternalism were less visible they became underlying excuses for removing Indigenous people from their land. 23 23 Some studies on paternalism and Indigenous interactions can be found here: Michelle M. Jacob and Wynona M. Peters, ““The proper way to advance the Indian”: race and gender hierarchies in early Yakima newspapers,” in Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 26, Issue 2, University of Minnesota Press, (September 2011); Laurel Clark Shire, “Sentimental Racism and Sympathetic Paternalism: Feeling like a Jacksonian,” Journal of the early Republic, 39, no. 1, (2019): 111- 122; Andrew H. Fisher, “People of the River: A history of the Columbia River Indians, 1855- 1945,” (PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University, August 2003); Helen Hersch Schuster, “Yakima Indian Traditionalism: A Study in Continuity and Change,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1975); Cassandra Carroll, “”They are like Children”: Father Wilbur and Paternalism at Fort Simcoe, 1860-1890,” (master’s thesis, All Master’s Thesis, 2020) 1383. https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/1383. 20 Chapter 2: Removal Fixed in Place-From ceded region to the reservation After the signing of the treaty and the opening of the land to white settlement came a rush of miners chasing rumors of gold in the region. Increased encounters between whites and Indians brought conflict and when some miners raped a Yakama woman in their path the young men responded by addressing the Indian Agent Andrew Bolon. The agent was concerned about white and Indigenous interactions but did not respond to young men’s complaints about the rape. Bolon’s disregard for the women enraged the young men and they killed him, launching them into the Yakima War (1855 to 1858). 24 During that time the US Army occupied what had long been the home and gardens of Skloom, a leader and the bother of Yakama leaders Kamiakin and Ow-hi. The site had been a popular resting place and natural springs called “Mool Mool,” a site that Yakama people used as place of respite. 25 The US Army confiscated and occupied Skloom’s home and built Fort Simcoe as a headquarters for the Army while Indian Agent was sent to White Salmon, near the Columbia River, from whence to oversee the Indigenous people. In 24 For generations the master narrative dominating the start of the Yakima War has been to blame Yakama Indians hostility but recent work done by Yakama Indigenous historian Emily Washines has shown that the impetus of the hostility was a response to the raping of Yakama women by white miners. Delia M. Coon does not make any mention of harm done to Indigenous women; Jo Miles explains it as “Some unruly behavior from minors brought retaliation from Native men who did not want to give up their wives to armed strangers. A chief’s physically disabled daughter was violated.”; and Washines ties the rape and Indigenous women during this time to the continued violence against Indigenous women now highlighted the MMIW activism. The war between the US and the Yakama Nation lasted from September 1855 through 1858. See Delia M. Coon, “Klickitat County: Indians of and Settlement by Whites,” The Washington Historical Quarterly, 14, no. 4, (1923), 249-250; Jo N. Miles, Kamiakin Country: Washington Territory in Turmoil, 1855-1858, (Caxton Press, 2017); and see Emily Washines, “Yakama War: Ayat,” Native Friends, 2019, accessed 12/1//2020, https://nativefriends.com/pages/yakama-war- ayat. 25 Yakima Agency, “Yakima Indian Nation” Bureau of Indian Affairs, Toppenish, Washington, 1971, page 9. 21 1858, when the Yakima War was over, there were 900 Indians at White Salmon, 1,200 living in the Cascade Mountain region, and 1,200 living near Fort Simcoe. 26 The US Army vacated Skloom’s home in 1859, but the government occupied Fort Simcoe as the site of the new Indian Agency. Immediately, the Indian Agent Dr. Richard Hyatt Landsdale revived Skloom’s gardens and established grounds for managing Indigenous people. 27 Landsdale believed that to civilize Indigenous people they needed to be fixed in place. As scholar Barbara Leibhardt has pointed out, agent Landsdale “believed that Indians required ‘domestication,’ much as did the cattle and other livestock they received from the government, in order to ‘fix them to the soil, as such domestication must always underlie any permanent progress in civilization,’” she wrote, quoting Landsdale’s report. 28 Landsdale expanded the farming project, purchased cattle, and planted 300 trees, most of which were apple trees, and set out to remove Indigenous people to the reservation. 29 26 Letter from Indian Agent Lansdale to Ed. R. Geary, esq, Superintendent of Indian Affairs on June 1, 1859, “I was instructed by your predecessor to break up and abandon the present Indian Agency of Columbia River District Washington Territory located at White Salmon and to remove my agency to Fort Simcoe and establish it on the reservation lately established by the ratification of the Yakima Treaty.” In US Bureau of Indian Affairs, Washington Superintendency, roll 17, 1858-1859, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, page 3; and Click Relander, “Fort Simcoe State Park,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Manuscripts and Typescripts, October 6-8, 1964. 27 Skloom, a treaty signer and brother of Kamiakin, died February 1, 1861 and was buried near his home. Yakima Agency, “Yakima Indian Nation” Bureau of Indian Affairs, Toppenish, Washington, 1971, page 16. Regarding Indian Agent Landsdale see Schuster, page 236. 28 Barbara Leibhardt, “Allotment Policy in an Incongruous Legal System: The Yakima Indian Nation as a Case Study, 1887-1934,” Agricultural History, Vol. 65, No. 4, (Autumn, 1991), pp 82; and Letter from Special Indian Agent A.H. Robie, Washington Territory, to Isaac Stevens on March 31, 1857, in US Bureau of Indian Affairs, Washington Superintendency, roll 17, 1858-1859, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, page 8. 29 Click Relander, “Fort Simcoe State Park,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Manuscripts and Typescripts, October 6-8, 1964, pages 2-3. 22 The efforts to relocate Yakama Indians to the reservation moved at a slow pace. The leaders had signed the treaty but the individual groups of people who they represented were not all in one accord and continued to live their life as they pleased. They saw themselves as sovereign and connected to place and followed their path as they had since time before memory. Some groups refused to be removed to the reservation and others outright refused to be counted for the census records. 30 The Indian Agents that followed Landsdale also tried with various levels of success to get Yakama people to remove to the reservation. Ashley H. Bancroft, father of Hubert H. Bancroft the famous historian and founder of The Bancroft Library, was the Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe for a short spell during which he advocated for James Wilbur, a Methodist minister who was working and living in Oregon country, to be hired as a schoolteacher. The first boarding school was opened at Fort Simcoe in 1861 with Wilbur as the schoolteacher and superintendent of farming. 31 This school set a pattern for other boarding schools around the country. When Bancroft and Wilbur had a falling out, Wilbur traveled to Washington DC to advocate for his reinstatement directly with President Abraham Lincoln who appointed him superintendent in 1864, and he served as the Indian Agent or superintendent until 1882. 32 Wilbur, a devout Methodist, called himself “Father Wilbur,” a title typically reserved for those of the Catholic faith, but it served him well to position himself with familial authority. Though he is 30 See image, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” in Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records (1848-1904). 31 Abraham Lincoln papers, Library of Congress, “From Anson G. Henry to William P. Dole, October 28, 1861. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/ms000001.mss30189a.1271700 32 The dispute was between Bancroft and Wilbur. Bancroft hired then fired Wilbur who took his concerns to President Lincoln, some of which included accusations of adultery on behalf of Bancroft. Lincoln reviewed Wilbur’s evidence and installed him as superintendent. Wilbur’s tenure was from 1860-1883. 23 remembered with respect by the Yakama people in modern times, it is common knowledge that his policy was one that combined “the Bible and the Plow.” 33 And though records show he had a jail house and used a whipping tree as a site of punishment, oral histories show that he dealt the same with Indians and whites, especially whites attempting to sell alcohol to Indians. 34 During Wilbur’s tenure he proved to have some success in getting Indians to remove to the reservation by using religious values tied to labor. In doing so he took on a familial authority and bestowed blessings to Christian converts through jobs, training opportunities, provisions (that were intended for all Indians but he limited to the Christian Indians) and by building converts houses. 35 His friend and Yakama Indian, George W. Olney remembered later in life that “Father Wilbur preached every Sunday and he built houses for the church members first, so to get a house built the Indians joined church…Only the Methodist members of Wilbur church got houses.” 36 But houses and work did not convince Indigenous people to fully settle on the 33 “The bible and the plow go hand in hand” is a quote attributed to Wilbur cited in Schuster’s work and in his centennial memorial brochure. Author Unknown, “Centennial year of The Wilbur Memorial Methodist Church,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Ephemera and Clippings, Ephemera; and Helen Hersch Schuster, “Yakima Indian Traditionalism: A Study in Continuity and Change,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1975). 34 See Relander, “Fort Simcoe,”; and Helen Hersch Schuster, “Yakima Indian Traditionalism: A Study of Continuity and Change,” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 1975, pages 235-237, 240; and George W. Olney, “Story of James H. Wilbur as the Yakima Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe-transcript,” June 1951, Yakima Memory, Digital Repository, accessed 12/11/2020. See also newspaper article in Relander Collection, #YIA-057- 01-001, The Dalles Mountaineer, July 24, 1864, Yakima Memory, Digital Repository, accessed 12/11/2020. 35 Regarding provision see Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, (Boston New York, 1883). 36 George W. Olney, “Story of James H. Wilbur as the Yakima Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe-transcript,” June 1951, Yakima Memory, Digital Repository, accessed 12/11/2020, page 4. 24 reservation. Olney recalled that the Indians who did settle on the reservation and abided by Wilbur’s rules still found ways to practice movement and live as they pleased. “Father Wilbur did not allow gambling and horse racing, also drinking intoxicants on the reservation so the Yakima Indians would go to this camping ground on a prairie and away from Father Wilbur’s presence.” 37 Though there were those who removed to the reservation, Indigenous people continued to live their usual and customary life moving through the ceded region outlined in the treaty. In 1881 when Wilbur submitted a report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the previous year, he noted that there were 647 Indians on the reservation permanently, cultivating farms or working with cattle and were people who “in general require no assistance.” Additionally, there were 1057 who lived part time on the reservation but relied on fishing and moved seasonally for their sustenance. Another 472 Paiute Indians were listed as living on the reservation and requiring assistance. 38 There were 598 Indians who lived consistently off the reservation returning only during the winter. In many ways, they were like the Indians who wintered at Rock Creek but wintered at the Yakama Reservation. They relied on fish, game, trade, and the sale of ponies. Then there were those Wilbur called “disaffected Indians” who lived off the reservation, a total of 276- surely the number of Indians recorded at Rock Creek. 39 37 George W. Olney, “Story of James H. Wilbur as the Yakima Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe-transcript,” June 1951, Yakima Memory, Digital Repository, accessed 12/11/2020, page 2. 38 James H. Wilbur, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1880-1881, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Transcriptions, 1881; Author Unknown, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” in Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records (1848- 1904). 39 James H. Wilbur, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1880-1881, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Transcriptions, 1881; Author Unknown, “Census of Indians refusing to give names or statistics belonging to Yakama Agency,” in Yakima Valley 25 Removal through the Allotment Act White settlers expected a smooth transition into settlement as they followed promotions that encouraged white settlement in the newly ceded region. They complained when Indians were not removed and confined to the reservation. 40 Agents tried many tactics to remove them but were largely unsuccessful but the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, commonly known as the Allotment Act, brought more possibilities for fixing Indians in place. Under the Allotment Act, individual Indians could be allotted 80 acres of land, 40 of which could be irrigable, or up to 160 acres of grazing land. Most allotments were 80 acres, and they were proposed by the Indian Agent, approved by the Secretary of the Interior, and signed by the president of the United States. Allotments were awarded with Trust Patents that provided Federal oversight of the land for 25 years. This oversight gave the Indian Agents on the reservation the power to manage and make decisions such as leasing of the land to white and Japanese farmers. After the Trust Patent expired, the land was issued a Fee Patent which gave the individual Indians the freedom to do as they wished with the land. Moreover, the first iteration of the Allotment Act granted US citizenship to Indigenous people with allotments. By fracturing the reservation into individual land holdings, the Federal government intended to make farmers of Indians and move them towards Americanization and assimilation. Allotment opened new possibilities for “fixing” Indians in place on the reservation though Wilbur preferred to build community through labor Libraries, Relander Collection, Government documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records (1848- 1904). 40 See letter to Indian Agent Wilbur on 5/4/1880 informing him that they were sent to confer with and “induce roving bands of Indians to go to Yakama, Colville, or Columbia” for a “permanent location and home.” See Clay H. Wood letter to Wilbur, “Instructed to proceed up the Columbia as far as Spokane Falls to confer with roving bands,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakama Indian Agency Records (1848-1904), 5/4/1880. 26 and religion. The turnover in Indian Agents after Wilbur did not bring any rigorous efforts to allot land to Indians until the longer tenure of Indian Agent Jay Lynch who served from 1891- 1893, then again from 1898-1909. Therefore, even though the Act was passed in 1887, Indian Agents did not begin allotting Indian land more readily on the Yakama Reservation until 1897. 41 Scholars have highlighted that Yakama Indians were reluctant to have their lands surveyed for allotments because only four signatures from Indians moved the allotment process forward. 42 But more than a lack of consensus, Indigenous people resisted surveillance of their land because they understood that this would fracture the communal land governed by a sovereign people. They also understood that allotment would increase the power of the US federal agents in their daily lives and create the surplus land for white settlers. Some Indians of the Yakama Nation asked for land, Indians of other nations and those who were of “mixed blood” also asked for and were awarded allotments, essentially making of them Yakama Indians. 43 The Indian Homestead Act of 1875 also brought Indigenous people from other nations requesting allotments, and white men who married Indian women (called “sq--w men” in some records) were also able to obtain allotments. 44 But despite a rush to allot land, it was issued 41 Wilbur issued 41 allotments according to his report in 1882, just before he left the agency. See “Statistics Accompanying Annual Report,” JH Wilbur, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakama Indian Agency Records (1848-1904), 8/21/1882. Though the Allotment Act was passed in 1887, the first Trust Patents that are recorded as approved at Fort Simcoe were dated May 17, 1897. See US Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records. 42 Leibhardt, 85. 43 The first “membership” rolls were assessed based on allotments, see Yakima Agency, “Yakima Indian Nation” Bureau of Indian Affairs, Toppenish, Washington, 1971, page 22. 44 See “Related to ‘squ-w men’ resident on the Yakama Reserve,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records, 1838- 1904), 4/13/1887; and Fifty-Eight Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1889, Washington Government Printing Office, 1889, page 295; and, 27 sporadically and did not bring about the desired effect of fixing Indians in place. For example, Indian Agent Robert H. Milroy (1882-1885) struggled with his interactions with the Yakama Indians and failed to remove them to the reservation from the ceded lands. 45 Commissioner of Indian Affairs admonished Milroy in a letter for his “various communications regarding the Indians belonging to your agency, who are off the reservation and persistently refuse to obey your order to return.” Milroy wasn’t alone, Jay Lynch, a subsequent Indian Agent, lamented in his reports about Indians refusing to be fixed in place. In 1891 he wrote: “Another group of ‘Wild Yakimas’ refused to take allotments on the reservation because they refused to take up Euro-American practices.” In another report submitted in 1895 Lynch wrote that “one-tenth of the Yakima population was ‘wild,’ and had vowed not to take up farming because they believed that the earth was their mother.” 46 Even with a promise for allotments on the reservation there Leibhardt, 85; Yakima Indian Reservation and Wapato Irrigation Project, Washington. Hearings before the Joint Commission of the Congress of the United States, 63 rd congress first session to Investigate Indian Affairs, September 29 and 30 and October 1 and 3, 1913, North Yakima, Toppenish, Fort Simcoe, and Seattle, Part 2, Washington Government Printing office, 1914, pages, 76-77, and 131. 45 Robert H. Milroy was a legal scholar and had served in the military, having served in the Mexico War and in the Civil War “with distinction and some controversy in the Civil War, rising to the ranks to Major General by 1862, but was also tried and acquitted of cowardice.” See Robert Huston Milroy Papers, 1772-1893, “Historical Note” in Archives West, accessed 7/20/2021. 46 Major J.W. Macmurray was dispatched to tell the Indians still residing on ceded land about the Allotment Act and the Indian Homestead Act with news about opportunities for their own allotments. He met with Smohalla, the Prophet and leader of the Dreamer religion. Smohalla was living in his ancestral lands at the foot of Priest Rapids on the Columbia River where his village lived their daily lives as semi-nomadic people. The Dreamer religion was completely opposed to being fixed in place and Smohalla preached a religion of cultural continuity. MacMurray wrote Smohalla’s words, “You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die I can not enter her body to be born again?” In, Major J.W. MacMurrey, “The ‘Dreamers’ of the Columbia River Valley, in Washington Territory,” Read before the Albany Institute, January 19, 1886, Yakima Valley Libraries, Click Relander Collection, Manuscripts and Typescripts, accessed 5/27/2021, page 1. Indian Agent reports cited by Leibhardt, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Annual Report to 28 were still thousands of Indians who refused to be removed or even counted in the ledgers under the Yakama Nation. Figure 3: Letter from H. Price, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to R.H. Milroy regarding the Indians who “persistently refuse to obey your order to return” to the reservation. 47 the Secretary of the Interior, 1891, (Washington DC: CPO, 1892), page 510,and 321, in Leibhardt, 87; See agent report on Indians occupying land away from the Yakama Reservation with attempts to get them allotted in their desired location, in T.J. Morgan, “Assist Indian colony along the Columbia River with registering the lands occupied by them,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakima Indian Agency Records, 1838- 1904), 10/14/1889. 47 H. Price, “Request for information about off reservation Indians” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakama Indian Agency Records (1848- 1904). 29 The Allotment Act which intended to fix Indians in place at the reservation did not bring the results the federal government had intended. Once fixing Indians on an allotment the Indian Agent was then charged with teaching Indians to treat the land like white farmers. The land was inhospitable to farming and had to be transformed requiring labor and time and other kinds of support to successfully assimilate Indians into farmers. Local white settlers eyed the reservation as a future site for large scale farming that would require a large-scale labor force, but the agents failed to provide support and training to help Indians enter the market. The Indian Agents aimed to make “industrious” Indians but were careless in training and did not provide the necessary equipment, but even more prohibitive, the agents did not set up an infrastructure for Indians to enter the market as farmers. 48 The Northern Pacific Railroad which had carved through the reservation in 1883 had even promised to give Indigenous farmers free use of the railroad for their produce, but the promise was never fulfilled. 49 Rather than providing a pathway towards the market for Indigenous people, the railroad like the Indian Agents brought harm to the land and to the individual allotment owners whose land was fractured for the sake of progress. 50 48 There are testimonies before the Congressional hearings that testify to the limitations under the Indian Agency. Consider the testimony of Nealy Olney who said that Indians would be better off if the agency did what it was intended to do and “teach the Indians business methods, and put them on business responsibility, and let them learn business methods and control, and make them so they can go out and handle their own matters.” Additionally, there are multiple testimonies regarding the role of the farmer on the reservation. Some people testified that they knew of Arthur G. Brown as an Indian Agent but that they had not had a “farmer” to support the Indians since Farther Wilbur. For example, Joseph Hoptowit reported that Brown was not helpful in any way as a farmer to Indians. See US Senate, Hearings, 1928, pp 99-101, and 145-148. 49 Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, The Crimes Against the Yakimas, (North Yakima, Washington: Republic Print, c1913), page 21. 50 See the account in McWhorter and in the official documents of the Department of Interior. McWhorter, 21; Message from the President of the United States: A communication 30 The lands were undeveloped and the official Indian Agency Farmer, Arthur G. Brown, who was assigned to support the local Indians in all things farming, was most interested in looking after his own affairs. Indigenous people declared that they did not know of an agency farmer, nor had they ever received training or support from one, though Brown was on the books and on the grounds. 51 Without support Indians struggled to get their farms in order. Apple orchards required years to produce fruit and vegetable crops could only provide part of the food and nutrition that Indigenous people required for sustenance and growing alfalfa and wheat required entering a sellers’ market. 52 Additionally, the labor demanded by farming stood in contrast to the gendered norms of labor in Indigenous life, and vastly different than the communal customs of root digging, berry picking, hunting, and fishing. But the biggest barrier was that the Indian Agents did not produce pathways for Indians to enter the market. Leibhardt argues that even though there were “industrious Indians” who entered the market, sold their goods, were successful farmers and ranchers and businessmen and women, the primary aim of assimilation projects was “to create a supply of wage laborers for American agriculture and industry and to channel Indian lands and resources into Euro-American hands.” 53 The system of from the Secretary of the Interior, with draft of a bill to ratify an agreement with the Indians at Yakima Reservation, December 21, 1885, 49 th Congress, 1 st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 21. 51 For example, Joseph Hoptowit reported that Brown was not helpful in any way as a farmer to Indians. See US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 99-101. 52 For more on the budding agricultural commodities in the region see reports such as, “Statistics Accompanying Annual Report,” JH Wilbur, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakama Indian Agency Records (1848-1904), 8/21/1882; “Car-lot shipments of fruits and vegetables by commodities, states and months: calendar year 1935,” and “Comparative Crop and Stock Census, 1926-1930, Yakima Indian Reservation,” in Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Reclamation Services. 53 Leibhardt, 80. 31 allotment was not set up with infrastructure to support Indian farmers but produce laborers and structure land ownership and use. If Indigenous people were supposed to be farmers in any successful way their possibilities were limited by the very agents who were intended to spur their productivity and assimilation into American life. 54 Logics of Removal: Land Speculators, Allotment Amendments, and Federal Policies While Indian Agents scrambled to survey and allot land, whites settled in surrounding cities had begun casting their eyes to the reservation land. At first glance, the reservation showed no potential as it was sparsely populated, undeveloped, and unirrigated. However, Indians had developed albeit simple but effective irrigation systems by making use of Yakima River’s tributaries that stretch into the Yakama Reservation, first to water the gardens and wheat fields of Fort Simcoe then extended to meet the demands of Indian farmers and the few white settlers who 54 When the Northern Pacific Railroad purchased land from the Yakama people, it was brokered through the Indian Agent Jay Lynch with translator Abe Lincoln. Eight individual Indians sold allotments to the company in amounts ranging from $18 dollars to $200. The railroad, however, had not only offered to pay Indians for the land that it used to traverse the reservation but promised it would provide “free passage and free transportation for their farms and products” that would benefit the Yakama Nation and not just the individual sellers. These promises were never fulfilled further limiting Indigenous entry into the market. Furthermore, the placement of a bridge to support the railroad destroyed one of the major canals that had been irrigating the farms of Indians and whites in the region, an environmental impact that hindered farming and spurred the need for the public and political monopoly on irrigation throughout the reservation. On the other hand, the Japanese immigrants on the reservation starting their own brokering and distribution organizations and thus made themselves both competition to white farmers and the focus of racialized exclusion efforts. While Indians did have indigenous leaders, who opened banks and started commercial clubs, these were Indigenous people who had been relieved from federal agent oversight, either because they were of mixed race, non-Yakama, or had been declared “competent” by the agents. Competency was contested and manipulated by Indian Agents in attempts to control Indian desires and power such as in their voice and vote. On the Northern Pacific Railroad see McWhorter, pages 17 and 21. See Leibhardt, 90; Ned Blackhawk, “American Indians and the Study of U.S. History,” in American History Now, co- edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), pages 378-401. 32 were able to access land. Chief Kamiakin’s own devotion to his garden prior to white settlement and the irrigation system he built in what is now known as Wiley City in the region is an example of the gardens and irrigation systems Indians had built prior to the treaty and reservation system. 55 At the time of his tenure, Wilbur had students and adults living and working at Fort Simcoe create a crude irrigation system. 56 Paiute Indians who were held at Fort Simcoe as prisoners of war, were also tasked with digging ditches and clearing land for the irrigation system. 57 By the late 1910s when Japanese immigrants had begun leasing land on the reservation, they found that the allotments were still largely undeveloped. Japanese farmers later speculated that they were given leases on the most undeveloped land to transform it before being 55 Kamiakin’s garden was marked by Yakima Valley pioneers on June 30, 1918, 500 people gathered at Wiley Grove in Ahtanum, including the Methodist minister and Yakama leader Rev. Waters, to commemorate the historical marker. The marker is not accessible to the public and the exact location is unknown as it is on private property. See “Yakima Indians (part 4),” Yakima Valley Libraries, Click Relander Collection, Relander Personal Papers, Relander Writings, 1955; and Adriana Janovich, “For Yakama, history is about Kamiakins garden,” in Indian Country News, September, 2007, https://www.indiancountrynews.com/index.php/news/education-life/1319-for-yakama-history-is- about-kamiakins-garden accessed 7/15/2021. 56 A letter from Wilbur to the Indian Commissioner Trowbridge in 1880 reads in part: “An immense amount of labor, digging and repairing irrigating ditches building houses, cutting and hauling saw logs, plowing… At least ten miles of irrigating ditches have been dug.” Agent Erwin was also charged with digging irrigation canals and provided with $5000 in funding to complete the task, though work was halted in 1895, at about the same time the Commercial Clubs in the surrounding cities began advocating for opening reservation land for white settlement. See, “Yakima Indians (part 4),” Yakima Valley Libraries, Click Relander Collection, Relander Personal Papers, Relander’s Writings, 1955. 57 A group of Paiutes had been ordered moved from Malheur Reservation to the Yakama Reservation as prisoners after the Bannock War. They were housed at Fort Simcoe for five years from 1878 to 1883 and according to Sarah Winnemucca who served as a leader and translator for the Paiutes, were sorely mistreated by Wilbur and the “civilized and Christian Indians.” See Winnemucca Hopkins, 93; Yakima Agency, “Yakima Indian Nation” Bureau of Indian Affairs, Toppenish, Washington, 1971, page 20; Sally Springmeyer Zanjani, Sarah Winnemucca,” (University of Nebraska Press, 2001). 33 moved to yet another undeveloped plot of land, leaving the cleared lands for white farmers. Chinese labor, minimally, was also used to dig ditches and develop land in the region. 58 Though looks could be deceiving, the potential for large-scale farms was alluring to white settlers and local businessmen. Speculation of the land increased even more during WWI when demand for food production increased. Local settlers in the nearby towns established fraternities and organizations such as the Commercial Clubs and the American League and used collective and organized power to shape the reservation land. For example, the Commercial Clubs of cities surrounding the Yakama Reservation, Yakima, Wapato, and Toppenish, had the attention of local politicians such as Wesley Jones who served in the US House of Representatives then as a Senator representing the state of Washington for several decades. One example of the collective organizing was when the Wapato club petitioned congress to appropriate $100,000 from the Yakama Tribe for the development of the roads to accommodate the white farmers leasing land on the reservation. 59 The petition from the Wapato Commercial Club reads in part: WHERE AS, It is the belief of the Wapato Commercial Club and the residents of the reservation in general that in view of the fact that the government controls the bulk of the land on the reservation for his ward the Indian, the government should see that suitable roads are provided for the white lessee of Indian lands on the Yakima Indian reservation, even though a special set of congress were necessary to accomplish the said result…” 60 58 For more on the Japanese labor on the land see my chapter, “Crafting Place.” 59 The petition from the Wapato Commercial Club ends with a notice that the Commercial Club had already met with Senator Wesley Jones “the newly elected congressman and senator from this district” and had encouraged “LaFollette and Poindexter, to use their best efforts” in this endeavor. L.V. McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Collection number: Cage 55, Box number 34, Folder Number 336a. 60 Lucullus V. McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Collection number: Cage 55, Box number 34, Folder Number 336a. 34 The Wapato club rallied with the North Yakima club asking for support and urging them to adopt and forward the resolution under the club’s power in support of Wapato. Local settlers used their collective local power to advocate for this infrastructure funding which came to be known as the Jones Road Bill at the federal level. 61 This collective advocacy is also evident in the amendments of the Allotment Act that favored white settlers and were intended to limit Indian control and weaken protections on reservation land. Members of the Commercial Clubs in North Yakima had begun petitioning Congress to open reservation lands starting in 1895 then helped shape allotment amendments to increase white settlement on the reservation. 62 It helped their cause when a local lawyer, Wesley L. Jones, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1898 then in 1908 elected as Senator where he served for 24 years. During this time, Wesley served on committees that dealt with land, public works, irrigation, and waterways. Jones’s biographer wrote that “The rights of the Indians may not always, perhaps, have been scrupulously regarded, but Jones did express the settlers’ point of view forcefully and effectively.” 63 Jones had no shortage of amendments he submitted to the Indian Reappropriation bill even if they all did not make it to the Senate floor. One of those, for example, was a bill that allowed for individual whites to lease allotments from Indians through the Indian Agency, because the original language of the bill had only allowed for corporations to lease land. The bill also provided for leases to be extended beyond five years, the set timeframe, 61 I am uncertain of the passage of the Jones Road Bill. 62 McWhorter, 6. 63 William Stuart Forth, “Wesley L. Jones: A Political Biography,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1962), pages 59-60, and 79. 35 by arguing that fruit trees and land development was too large an investment for such a short lease. White settlers took issue with the Trust Patent which was a 25-year federal protection on Indian land. This measure protected land from unscrupulous land speculators by assuring the land could not be sold or leased without the direct approval of the Indian Agent. Because the first iteration of the Act provided US citizenship with an allotment, local whites argued that if Indians were ready to be US citizens, they should manage their own land. They argued that federal protections were a special privilege not offered to white citizens and should be done away with. 64 In response, rather than remove the Trust Patent, the US government removed the granting of US citizenship to the Allotment Act. A series of amendments followed which diminished the control Indians had over their allotments, their access to the rental income that could be gained from them, and the automatic citizenship provided for in the original Allotment Act and favored the opening of land for white settlement. If allotment could produce surplus land, then the amendments assured the surplus land would be available to white settlers. If the land tenure could be more flexible, then white settlers could deal directly with Indians, often in unscrupulous ways, to get their land from underneath them. Amendments made to the allotment act assured white settlers were prioritized in the accessing of Indigenous land. The 1894 and 1898 amendments allowed for the building of canals on the reservation. Indigenous people and the few white farmers who had settled on surplus land 64 Indian Commissioner F.E. Leupp spoke in his address to Congress in support of the Burke Act argued that “although they are technically citizens of the community which they live, they and their fellows pay no taxes on their lands, and hence the [non-Indigenous] community is loath to extend them the help it gives to other unfortunate people.” In Committee on Indian Affairs Authorizing Noncompetent Indian Allottees to Dispose of Allotments, Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, 59 th Congress, 2 nd Session, 1906, House of Representatives, Doc. No. 80. 36 had been establishing systems of irrigation on the reservation to water their farms and gardens. But these amendments were aimed at institutionalizing the irrigation into public works, as a response and to prepare for what they anticipated would be the inevitable opening and large- scale white settlement of the reservation. The Northern Pacific Railroad had cut through the reservation in 1883 and brought with it more land speculation. One observer described this in 1886: “White settlers were moving into the country very rapidly, owing to the recent completion of the Northern Pacific railroad, the route of which road lay through the Yakima valley, the richest, and most populous of the Indians’ lands. In fact, the road was located through Indian fields and orchards, with little respect for individuals’ rights.” 65 Not only did it cause erosion in the canals and laterals that had been created, but a canal that had fed many allotments was filled in with earth to accommodate a bridge for the railroad, manufacturing a need to institutionalize a public irrigation system. 66 Destroying the canals to institutionalize the flow of water gave the local and State government a hand in the Federally run reservation water issues. Burke Act- Forced Fee Patents and Competency In 1904 and 1906 the Burke Act further impacted the Allotment Act and the everyday life of Indigenous people on the Yakama reservation. This act weakened the Trust Patents on allotments that had been set to protect the Indian land from white encroachment for at least 25 years. It allowed for Fee Patents which gave the landowner the freedom to do as they wished with their land to be issued before the 25-year term limit under one of two conditions- either 65 Major J.W. MacMurrey, “The ‘Dreamers’ of the Columbia River Valley, in Washington Territory,” Read before the Albany Institute, January 19, 1886, Yakima Valley Libraries, Click Relander Collection, Manuscripts and Typescripts, accessed 5/27/2021, page 1. 66 McWhorter, 10-11. 37 because the Indian was considered “competent,” or the Indian Agent approved a “Forced Fee Patent.” Though competency brought with it the precariousness of having to deal with unscrupulous land speculators, some Indigenous people used this as a path to loosen themselves from the federal oversight. The Forced-Fee Patent was the most damaging of the two because it only required that the Indian Agent submit a request for a fee patent even if the Indigenous person had not requested it and at times had no knowledge of it. The act gave the Secretary of the Interior the discretion to deem an Indian allottee as “competent and capable of managing his or her affairs” and issue a Forced Fee Patent, even if the process was unbeknownst to the landowner. 67 The act provided a pathway for individual landowners to be loosed from the Federal government oversight but simultaneously made them vulnerable to land speculators who had their eye on the reservation. By claiming “competency,” Indigenous people took control of their own affairs and leased, rented, or managed their land as they saw fit even if it came at the cost of paying taxes and being vulnerable to settlers. Others, though eligible for competency chose not to apply for it to avoid taxes and dealing with whites. One man chose not to apply for competency arguing that though he was eligible he was still socially excluded from white spaces and did not see the benefit of it. 68 On the other hand, the Secretary of Interior through the local men at the Indian Agency increased their power with the forced fee patent. This new process left the Indigenous person completely out of the process of making decisions on the land. Keeping in mind that the Secretary of Interior had little to no knowledge of individual land or allotment owners, the power to make decisions about competency and land ownership was in the hands of 67 Burke Act, 1906. 68 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 314-315, 389. 38 the local Indian Agents on the ground who could manipulate the strings of competency for their own gain or the benefit of others. Just as competency could be approved, it could also be denied. Because it was up to the Indian Agent to recommend approval of competency, it could be withheld to manipulate Indians into doing something asked of them. Such was the case of Louis Mann, a Yakama man who was a strong advocate for his people and served as secretary of the Tribal Council and translator. This was also the case in 1910 when the Indian Agents on the Yakama Reservation used the competency rules to attempt to force compliance for the Jones Bill of 1906. The Jones Bill- Land for Water, Water for Land The Jones Bill, proposed by Yakima’s own Wesley Jones, was major legislation that institutionalized irrigation and asked Indigenous people to pay to irrigate their land with land. In other words, if Indians agreed to sell 60 of their 80 acres, the sale would fund irrigation for the remaining 20 through the public works office. This would create 60 acres of surplus land from each willing allotment owner that could then be sold to white settlers. Indians refused this act outright because though the treaty did not explicitly mention the Yakima River which borders the reservation land, they argued and the courts later agreed, they had rights to half of the river flow. H.M. Gilbert and other supporters of the land for water trade argued that the surplus land would create white neighbors, a benefit to the Indians so that they could learn from and practice American ways. But when many Indigenous people refused what they accurately understood as a bad deal, Gilbert recommended that the forced fee patent be used in the case of Indians not wanting to comply. 69 He wrote that, “It would be better to … give such Indians as do not want to 69 Citing the report of the Indian Committee that urged for the passage of the Jones Bill, in McWhorter, 7. 39 take advantage of the Jones bill, patents in fee simple and treat the allotted Indians as they really are, American citizens.” Lucullus McWhorter, an advocate who documented Indigenous struggles wrote that what Gilbert intended was that “Then the white man with much booze and very little money will speedily ‘eliminate’ the ‘Indian factor’ from the Yakima Valley forever.” 70 McWhorter and Indigenous people understood that the forced fee patent was a vehicle for further dispossessing Indigenous people of their land. Nonetheless the Jones Bill fell short on the settler fantasy to eliminate Indigenous people from their land. Ordering white and Indian neighbors was only a good idea in theory, but land speculators eventually realized that white settlers wanted land free of Indians. Gilbert offered a new plan in a letter written to Wesley Jones in May of 1909: “I suggested to him a plan. It was as follows: Attorney Williamson represented that the Reclamation Service did not like to have the Indians hold twenty acres out of each allotment as, in their opinion, it would greatly injure the [reclamation] project, that is, white people would not want to buy sixty acres out of each eighty-acre tract, leaving the Indian family in possession of the other twenty acres, and he thought that it would be a very much better plan if the Indians could be segregated on some other section of the Reservation and allow them sell the full eighty acres of each allotment. …New allotments could be made to the Indians, either in the mountains, or upper valleys or on the Satus where the Indians could go and raise stock and do their farming together. Yours, H.M. Gilbert 71 McWhorter was disgusted. Removing Indians from the reservation to the Cascades, where, he wrote, “frost and snow holds revelry seven months in the year, was seriously contemplated as the Last Segregation and Final Grave of the helpless Yakima is appalling. It is well that this hellishly 70 Citing a letter from Gilbert in McWhorter, 16-18. 71 Printed letter from H.M. Gilbert to Wesley L. Jones, in McWhorter, 23-24. 40 inhuman plot was kept from the ears of the home loving and excitable tribesmen.” 72 The settler colonial fantasy took on new shapes in efforts to remove Indians from their reserved land. But many Indians refused the Jones Bill despite the best and worst efforts to get them to sign away their land. And though that plot to fully remove Indians from the reservation was never realized, the Jones Bill was a continual effort to have Indians sign away three fourths of their land. The Indian Agent S.A.M. Young submitted a report of 726 of 3000 Indians in support of the Jones Bill to the Secretary of the Interior: Competents 132 Minors on account of incompetent parents 57 Incompetent adults 327 Minors, competent parents 69 Minors, orphans 14 Deceased Indians 67 White owners 160 Total 726 McWhorter noted that “all except those designated ‘competents’” were signed by the Superintendent, emphasizing the manipulation it took to get people to sell their lands. 73 When Louis Mann, the secretary of the Yakama Tribal Council and staunch advocate and letter writer, refused to support the Jones Bill he was denied competency simply because of his refusal. In the denial of his competency claim, Mann was told that if he agree to the Jones Bill and sell 60 of his 80 acres of land, he would be granted competency. 74 Mann was not alone. Also denied 72 McWhorter, 24. 73 McWhorter added the note, “All except those designated “competents” being signed by the Superintendent. Reported to the Secretary of Interior, quoted in McWhorter, 34. 74 McWhorter, 30. 41 competency for the same reason were the Methodist minister, and Head Chief of the Yakimas, Rev. Stwire G. Waters; the clan chief of the Ahtanum and president of the Yakima Tribal Court, We-Yallup Wa-Ya, Ci-ka; a successful merchant tailor and graduate of the Chemewa Indians School who held a voice and music theory certificate, R.D. Holt; an eighth-grade schoolteacher Mrs. Bessie Swarts, and others who otherwise would not have been denied competency. One can see that in balancing the demands of the Indigenous people whom they were supposed to guard, and those of the locals in power, Indian Agents most often sided with the settlers. For example, superintendent Don M. Carr (1912-1924) struggled to side with Indigenous people when called to give an account on the value of land on the reservation. At a Senate hearing (1913) orchestrated as a response to the relentless protest of Indigenous people against the Jones Bill, Representative Charles D. Carter (Oklahoma) asked Carr what the value of an allotment was. He responded, “The values would range from twenty to one hundred and forty or fifty dollars. The average selling price for the past few years has been in the neighborhood of $60 an acre.” This was confusing even to the Representative, so he asked to clarify for the full allotment value, not per acre. Carr responded again, “Well, there would be 80 acres, and at $20, would be $1,600. The range would be pretty high there.” If we do the math on Carr’s initial statement, an allotment of 80 acres could range between $20/acre to $150/acre, which would be between $1,600 to $12,000, with the average being $4,800. But when given a chance to clarify, Carr chose to underestimate the value of the land giving the lowest possible amount that an allotment was worth at $1,600. 75 Carr’s inconsistencies on pricing Indian land demonstrates a paternalistic spirit, that is, a sense of corrupt responsibility and low esteem for the Indigenous 75 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 103. 42 people he was hired to guard. Underestimating the value of their land and withholding its full value demonstrated that he did not trust them to handle nor deserve a full and fair deal. As a result of the paternalistic spirit and the undermining of the value of land, the Indian Agents instituted a harmful practice of making land appraisals public. Even the Senators and Representatives conducting the interview with the superintendent in 1913 were confused by this practice that did not favor the Indigenous people. But Superintendent Carr explained that since 1910 they had made it practice to publish the list of land for sale with their appraised value. The agency chief clerk at the time, Harry B. Miller, argued that this helped with the land sales because no land was sold for less than the appraisal. It was only later learned that Miller was not simply publishing the value of land but was producing and selling maps of land for sale on the reservation of his own volition. When Senator Charles Townsend (Michigan) pressed further, Miller explained that “the lands which sold during the time the appraisements were not made public were much higher than those obtained since that time.” 76 But since the reservation land value had gone down in the previous years, land speculators from outside of the region were still bidding too high. 77 The answers tell us that the Indian Agents intended to keep the land value low, but this should not be confused with wanting to sell more land to just any white settler. Indian Agent Carr also agreed that the appraisals were often too high. 78 Indians who testified disagreed. Take for example the testimony of Thomas Robins who stated that land had been sold at half or even less than half what it was worth as was the case for his allotment. This resulted, in 76 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 165. 77 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 165. 78 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 89. 43 his estimation, in the “gradual falling away of the Indian.” 79 Robins logically concluded that even though the bids were sealed, they would never overbid beyond the appraisal if the appraisal was public. 80 Miller explained that there was a “highly speculative spirit” with white settlers entering the valley and wanting land but without knowing what the land was worth. The bids were “wild”, he said, coming in at 150% of the appraisal and other times the bids were very low. The agency felt this was harmful to the settlers, so they decided to make the appraisals public even if it negatively impacted Indigenous people. Miller, Carr, and the other agents understood this to benefit the purchaser and this is clear evidence of the settler colonial logics. 81 With this system the Indian Agents inadvertently developed a framework that benefited powerful capitalists by keeping the land value low and hoped to expedite the removal or “falling way” of the Indian. On the witness stand at the 1913 hearings, Carr was asked about agents dealing with Indian land. More than loopholes and technicalities, the representatives wanted to know about unscrupulous and illegal dealings with land. They asked if Carr had received any information about this to which he responded, “I did not receive it; I discovered it.” When Carr started his tenure at Fort Simcoe in 1912, the chief clerk Harry B. Miller (known also as H.B. Miller) had already been established for four years. As chief clerk, Miller had control of the book of leases that were coming due, and maps of the region of surplus land, along with first-hand knowledge to the appraisals and sealed bids. Carr grew suspicious when a handful of white capitalists and land speculators wanted only to deal with Miller and no other agents in the office. Carr 79 Testimony of Thomas Robins in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 145-146. 80 Thomas Robins, Hearings, 1913, page 146. 81 Testimony of H.B. Miller in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 165, 166. 44 suspecting something about the friendship between Miller, W.L. Powell, A.J. Rohrer, and R.B. Brown, three known capitalists who lived on the reservation and were often called upon by locals as land experts in the region. 82 This, Carr testified, caused him to “commence to look sharp.” 83 Carr then followed the sale of the Joe Pollywaka allotments, which were bid on and purchased by one of these capitalist A.J. Rohrer and within a month the allotments were sold to Miller then turned for a large profit, a pattern that is seen with Miller and those in his company. Taking a closer look, Carr found that Miller and Rohrer had filed an agreement on the sale of the Pollywaka allotments a month before the allotments were given a Fee Patent (released for sale) and even before the land had been put up for auction. Carr immediately reported the discrepancy to the Secretary of the Interior and requested a formal investigation with a letter: “It is alleged that a clerk of the Yakima Agency who has charge of appraising and selling Indian lands has been selling Indian lands to a confederate and then having the land transferred to himself, and thereafter selling said lands at a very big profit.” 84 The request fell on deaf ears until the following year and after many more letters. After the investigation, Miller was found to have dealt with at least five different allotments in this same way. He was also charged with lying to the investigators and for illegally producing and selling maps of the reservation land, selling 82 W.L. Powell was superintendent of Instruction from October 1, 1871 to June 30, 1879 and was well acquainted with the Indian Agency and the Yakama Reservation. James H. Wilbur, “Report of the employees at the Yakama Agency for the year ending June 30, 1879,” Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Government Documents, Yakama Indian Agency Records (1848-1904). 83 Testimony of H.B. Miller in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 88. 84 Letter from Superintendent Carr submitted as evidence in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 82-83. 45 them at $1 a piece to which he reported he made about $800 per year for several years on the maps. 85 Carr seemed regretful and apologetic for having discovered Miller’s improprieties. Attempting to explain Miller’s behavior, Carr wrote to the investigator, “The fact is I am very sorry for Mr. Miller, yet he certainly knew what chances he was taking…I do not blame him entirely for I honestly believe if he had not been made so much of by friends until he thought he was “it” he would not have violated even technically any regulation.” 86 Carr reduced Miller’s actions to conceit, explaining that he must have felt untouchable, completely sidestepping the harm that Miller caused Indigenous people. When confronted, Miller tried to resign, but the federal investigator made it clear in the record that his resignation would not be accepted and that he was, indeed, fired. 87 There was no public fall from grace and no newspapers reported it that I could find. Perhaps it was because of Miller’s popularity or connections, or maybe because Miller was immediately hired by the H.M. Gilbert at the Central Bank of Toppenish that had been established in 1910. A history of Yakima Valley marks this moment as Miller being “called” to work at the bank when the cashier suddenly left his position. 88 At the bank, Miller established the Reservation Investment Company and continued his dealings with Indian lands. Focusing on whether Miller thought too highly of himself ignores the fact that he had access to 85 See letter dated November 8, 1913, from Indian Commissioner Cato Sells to H.B. Miller in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 117. 86 See letter from Carr to federal investigator Abbott dated 1/13/1913 in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 84. 87 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 120. 88 William Denison Lyman, History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton counties, Volume 2,” (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1919), page 638. 46 all the information needed to make shady deals and steal land. Though he was fired in 1913, his land dealings continued until the end of his life in 1931, taking liberties that no other person was afforded and managing up to 900 acres of land throughout the reservation with stocks in the Reservation Investment Company and in his own mortgage company. A network of exploitation: Miller, Rohrer, Powell, Brown, and Gilbert Miller was born in 1885 in Cleveland Ohio and had moved to the Yakama Reservation in 1908 to work as clerk at the Indian Agency. He was transferred there and worked first under the supervision of his uncle then under Superintendent Carr. Miller was married and had no children. 89 His wife, Mary, was from Chicago and her family members including her brother-in- law, Fred Houghton, would eventually move to the reservation as they found ways to purchase Indian land through Miller. 90 Reese Rowen B. Brown, known to his neighbors as R.B., was born in Virginia in 1881. His family moved to the reservation at the turn of the century and he and Miller were about the same age with young wives living on the Reservation in the early 1910s. They were neighbors on the reservation and visited each other for dinner at their homes and at the Fort Simcoe boarding club fantasizing about land. 91 89 Certificate of Death, Harry B. Miller, Washington State Board of Health, accessed on January 20, 2021, on Ancestry.com 90 It was convenient for Miller to use friends and family as middlemen when purchasing Indian land. Fred Houghton, Dan Trimble (worked at the Central Bank in Toppenish), W. Cantrell, JM Keith, S.W. Clark, and a Benz brother were amongst those listed as middlemen in land purchases and later under the Reservation Investment Company that was an arm of the Central Bank which was run by H.M. Gilbert. The Reservation Investment Company was incorporated for $40,000, owned by the stockholders of the Central Bank of Toppenish, organized as a subsidiary corporation. See Yakima Indian Reservation and Wapato Irrigation Project, Washington. US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 6, 131, 137, page 187. 91 US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 178. 47 In 1901 Brown listed his occupation on the census record as a grain farmer and later Miller testified that he was a nursery man and a farmer, but by the 1920s Brown touted himself as a capitalist. 92 Brown’s father had moved to the city of Yakima just a few miles north of the Reservation and had been successful at farming when all the Brown brothers decided to move to the region. The brothers quickly got a reputation for their mass land holdings, especially R.B. Brown who eventually established the unincorporated city of Brownstown on the Yakama Reservation. This reputation was even known among the local Japanese farmers. Kara Kondo, a Japanese American woman who was born on the reservation later reflected, that the Brown brothers had “came from Virginia with the idea of having big plantations, Virginia plantations…and they had staked out large amounts of farmland, and they were all around us with great big houses.” The intention of building large plantations would have to be done through loopholes and Kondo continued, “we were told, that they had accumulated land in very, some ways that were not really legitimate.” 93 If the story is true, that Brown wanted to build a plantation-sized land holding on the reservation then it would explain why he spent most of his life defrauding Indians out of their land. Brown was connected to the most powerful men in the region including Wesley L. Jones the US Senator who verified Brown’s identity on his passport application, and his connections with local capitalists is clear in the archival record. Brown, Powell, Rohrer, Gilbert, Jones, and Miller were well acquainted, worked together in different capacities and connected to the local commercial clubs. Gilbert personally attempted to convince Indians to sign over their leases, offering them gifts of blankets and attempting to gather signatures for the Jones Bill to be enacted. Lucullus McWhorter, a contemporary and 92 Miller’s testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1913, 172. 93 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, “Kara Kondo Interview,” Densho Digital Archives, page 4. 48 advocate for the Yakama people, called this group a “confederacy,” I call this a network of exploitation that was built around powerful white men who often wrote letters from their companies or moved through the organizations that they participated in to advocate for thier personal interests. The Logics of Removal Miller’s attitude before the Senate hearings reveal that he felt removed from the harm he was causing. He was dismissive of any harm he may have cause Indigenous people and relied on the logic of distance from Indigenous people by using loopholes and technicalities to manipulate land without thinking about the impact it had. His supervisor, Carr, testified that Miller felt untouchable, and it is evident in his responses at the hearing. While the Allotment Act fabricated the ownership of land and the amendments created the loopholes, it was the logics and actions of real people who put them to use to remove land from Indians on the reservation. Miller responded with arrogance, at times asking for his personal finances to be kept out of the record, other times, forgetting convenient details about his dealings with land. At times, he would concede only that the documents contained his signature but claimed that he could not ascertain if he had written the documents. Flippant as he was, he still had a reputation in the community to uphold and he did so by removing himself as much as possible and dealing with land through his multiple businesses. If land was not outright transferred through shady land deals out of Indigenous people’s hands, the Indian Agents micromanaged and manipulated the use of land through the agency. Testimonies before the Senate in 1913 and 1928 expose the two primary tactics- manipulating who could rent an allotment and withholding irrigation from allotments when Indigenous people did not comply with the agent’s desires. For example, David Wallahee testified in 1928 that after 49 working for several years for the agency farmer, Arthur G. Brown, he decided to farm his own allotment. To do so, he would need to pay an irrigation fee and because he was short $40 dollars, he could not access the water. After paying the balance, Wallahee expected to continue working on his farm but again, his access to water was denied. Wallahee testified that he went to address the situation with the superintendent Evan W. Estep (1924-1930) who responded, “you had better not farm your land your own self; rent it to somebody else.” Wallahee testified, “and I didn’t mind him, and I went to go ahead and farm my place. But Estep said I always farm for Farmer Brown and not for myself; I was just working for wages, and I told him, No; I just farm my own.” When Wallahee refused to work for Brown, Estep denied his request for water. And the farm failed. An interpreter continued with Wallahee’s testimony, “Had to burn down his crop in June in 1925.” Wallahee’s allotment was then leased out by the superintendent without his approval. “My own land is rented to Benz: he was to farm it; Estep signed the lease in my name; but he won’t let me sign my name. Lease made to Benz Brothers and signed the lease himself.” Wallahee returned to work for wages. 94 By manipulating the access to water, Estep made Wallahee a wage worker rather than a farmer on his own land. That the superintendent would personally withhold the access to water sounds like a misunderstanding, but Dolly Woodhouse, a lease clerk at the agency, testified that this was not the only time Estep manipulated access to water to get Indians to do as he pleased. 95 94 David Wallahee Testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 90-93. 95 Being unable to access water was a common testimony. See testimony of Elizabeth Penoyer who said they couldn’t access water for their allotment and much less for their daily use. “They have to hitch their wagon and go after their water for their own house use…and everything went dry, all crops; we can not raise no more crops on the home place.” The water issue was a complex system that impacted whites as well as Indians, though Indians disproportionately. See testimony of Mark Wilcox, a white farmer. Wilcox appeared before the hearings to testify on behalf of himself and his white farmers who had been impacted by the lack of irrigation water. Withholding water was a tactic that played out on other reservations as well 50 Another common tactic was to isolate women to make them more vulnerable and compliant. For example, Lucullus McWhorter noted that the superintendent Carr and two associates had gone to the home of Evelyn Thomas to solicit the sale of an heirship allotment. When they arrived they found that a neighbor, a man named Ben Ough, was visiting Thomas at the same time. Carr and his associates “went away until Ough left,” then returned and “dickered for the land,” McWhorter documented. 96 Carr and his associates found it to their advantage to deal with women in isolation. On another case, Olsen Reuben and Maggie Rueben who had adjacent allotments were defrauded of a higher price because Miller wanted to control the land. Dolly Woodhouse testified that N.J. Knight of the nearby town of Outlook signed a lease to pay $12 per acre per year and even paid a full year ahead- this was unusual as farmers who were leasing land often had little to no upfront capital and therefore had to solicit a bondsman to sign for them. When Miller caught wind that someone from out of town had paid such a high price for the Rueben allotments he complained and although he had not worked for the agency in over a decade, he was still privy to knowledge about land leases and had the power to sway the superintendent. Against the landowner’s desires, Estep found a technicality through which to dismiss the lease for Knight. Olsen protested but Estep manipulated Maggie into signing the new lease to Fred Houghton (Miller’s brother-in-law whom he used in several cases to manipulate the maximum amount of acreage allowed for leasing). Dolly Woodhouse testified: Reuben still insisted he would not sign any lease for Fred Houghton or H.B. Miller on that land, and Olsen needed money and they would not give him any money through the as seen in the senate hearings of 1928. See Harrison Brown for example on an Oregon reservation, and Dolly Woodhouse testimony in, US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 22, 242-247, 305- 307. 96 Lucullus McWhorter Papers, “Case To be Investigated- Indian Affairs, Reported Jan. 1923.” L.V. McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Collection number: Cage 55, Box number 16, Folder number 128. 51 office whatsoever, and finally wore him down until Mr. Miller came in the office … and the major [Estep] handed Maggie a slip which she gave to me, and on this slip was this: “Maggie will sign this lease for H.B. Miller.” Which she did at that time, and at the same time Olsen Reuben signed his forms, and he was given a check through the office. 97 By removing Olsen from the negotiation and cornering Maggie, superintendent Estep manipulated both individuals and their land. To be clear it was more than loopholes and technicalities, more than influencing public policy that shaped the region- the impact was felt in the daily lives of Indigenous people. The loopholes and technicalities made systemic violence possible and allowed for the victimization of Indigenous men and women, and even worked to keep white men who stood in their way. White farmers testified about this in the senate hearings and Lucullus McWhorter who was a contemporary of the Yakama people documented case after case of Indigenous people targeted for their land. Take for example a note in McWhorter’s personal archives, “Wallace Arquett. This man thought that he was mortgaging his 80 acres to Mr. Brown for $5000.00; but actually signed a warrantee deed. He lost his land. Henry Andrew Lillie, Dito.” 98 McWhorter explained that R.B. Brown “had gained most of his wealth in real-estate deals involving Indian land patents around Yakima. Brown would help the Indians prove they were competent to handle their own affairs.” Brown would then “loan them money and when they found it difficult to repay, he 97 For more on Indian Agents having women sign leases by coercion or deceit, see testimony of Joseph Wynaco (1928, 240) who described their desire to change lessees from one person who had not paid their rental fees to another person who offered more for the lease. The Indian Agent Brown convinced them to lease to the same person who was still arrears on their rent and even after they protested, he had Joseph’s mother sign the lease anyways. Joseph testified, “Mr. Brown was the one that made her sign it, and so I couldn’t do anything after she signed the lease.” Dolly Woodhouse Testimony, and Joseph Wynaco testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 23-24, and 240. 98 Lucullus McWhorter Papers, “Indians Buncoed by Mr. R.B. Brown,” L.V. McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Collection number: Cage 55, Box number 16, Folder number 128. 52 would help them find purchasers for their land.” 99 Using the network and inside knowledge of land tenure, Brown and his contemporaries amassed large amounts of land on the Yakama Reservation. These men in power victimized men and women, withheld funds for their livelihood, denied access to irrigation water, and often chose to corner the women to more easily intimidate or coerce into compliance. The most harm was done to the Indian landowners, but we should also understand that it did not quite matter who was in their way- in the above case the Rueben’s lost the most and their will was manipulated, but Mr. Knight, a rich white farmer, was also removed from the situation. This telling story indicates that if another white man threatened the careful web of networks, they too were removed. The access Miller had on the Indian Agency was held in place by financial gain. J.H. Immel, a shareholder and business associate of Miller, testified at the hearings that because the bank had taken on bonds on leases during a precarious time, they felt they should get some special treatment. Immel and Miller had met with superintendent Estep and “called to his attention” the heavy loss the bank took on as bondsmen when farmers walked off the leases without paying their rents. He explained that “in each case which we had a chattel mortgage we took our loss and saw that the Indians got their rent, and thought we should receive not special consideration, but we should be given consideration for the renewal of the lease.” 100 99 Elmer L. Irey, “The Case of the Rich, Rich Widow” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1923- 2003), January 9, 1949, ProQuest, Historical Newspapers, page 59 of 118. 100 Testimony of J.H. Immel, secretary of the Reservation Investment Company, banker and real estate investor, US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 165-166. 53 Figure 4: Letter from HB Miller to Lucy James on July 2, 1920, offering to process a lease or purchase her land. There is no information as to how Miller knew that James had received a Fee Patent. 101 101 McWhorter Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Collection number: Cage 55, Box number 16, Folder number 128. 54 Immel’s testimony cannot fully explain why Estep allowed Miller to have access to private information. Dolly Woodhouse testified that his privilege to private federal and tribal information was not a secret. Through the Investment Company, the bank, and personal contacts and family like Fred Houghton, Miller held 920 acres in his control. 102 To demonstrate Miller’s manipulation and privilege to information, Woodhouse recounted the issue of Elizabeth and Susan Johnson’s land even though, she explained, the “case was in my estimation so bad I didn’t care to be mixed up in it.” Susan and John Johnson, and their daughter Elizabeth, had been leasing their allotments on the reservation. When John passed away the rental income for the allotments came in short, so Elizabeth and her mother went to the Indian Agency to inquire about the change. Dolly Woodhouse searched up the matter and discovered that there had been a reduction of rent on the allotments in the amount of about $200 which was approved right after John’s death by the superintendent Carr (who was no longer at the agency). There was no explanation and no remedy- the women would just have to do without. But the manipulation of the Johnson women and their land had just begun. 102 The maximum acreage allowed for leasing was 160 acres. Woodhouse testified, “this one, H.B. Miller would come in the office, and he would ask to look this list over. Well nobody else had that privilege, and I could not understand why this H.B. Miller had that privilege over anyone else, and my office was arranged so I had quite a high desk where I fixed up the applications, and then right back of this between where the Indian and the white people stood was a copy of a map of the reservation on the wall behind there, and heh would come behind the counter and take this book, and with the full knowledge of the superintendent and the chief clerk, and myself I knew of it, and I didn’t have any authority to refuse it when the superintendent knew it was going on, and he would take this book over and pick out the land that was coming up for lease, and of course, he being on the reservation quite a while, he knew the quality of the land….and the next thing you know the application was made for them…” Dolly Woodhouse Testimony, in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 15-16. 55 In the months that followed, the women learned that Mike Croft, the farmer who had leased their land, had lost money on the farm from the previous year and since Miller had signed as the bondsman, Miller was responsible for paying the rental income. Because Croft abandoned the farm and then the owner of the allotment, John, passed away, it is likely that the rental income was adjusted for Miller. The practice of negotiating reduction in rental income was not an isolated case. 103 Miller and Immel had already warned the agents that they expected to get an advantage and a priority in recuperating losses. When it came time to renew the lease, the superintendent Estep, “insisted that they [Elizabeth and Susan] have Miller take the lease.” 104 Though Estep and the other agents understood Miller’s Investment company to be “dummy method of him getting more leases,” Estep wanted to help Miller recoup his losses from when Croft abandoned it. 105 But the Johnson women did not trust Miller and refused to lease to him because they knew him to be a banker. 106 They felt the repercussions of this refusal when the women needed to withdraw money from their account at the bank. At the bank, Miller presented them with a blank lease and Elizabeth testified that he had told her, “I can not let you people have any more money unless you people sign this lease.” The women refused even though they were in turn denied access to their money. The only way out for the Johnson women was to find another person willing to lease their land. 103 See Joseph Hoptowit’s testimony, US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 99. 104 In many cases, the Senate hearings confirmed that bondsmen would often not pay the fees or rental income and the Indian Agents did not pursue delinquent bills. Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 95. 105 Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 95. 106 Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 95. 56 Allen C. Nave was a farmer and investor who visited the reservation in search of an allotment to lease and as it was her job, Woodhouse suggested the Johnson allotments. Nave viewed the allotment and paid ahead a full year at $9 per acre. Major Estep approved the lease and Woodhouse drew up the paperwork and sent it to the bondsmen who would declare a bond for the remaining years of the lease. It seemed the women were in the clear, but Woodhouse explained, “While these leases were lying down town it appeared that Mr. H.B. Miller got wind of this deal that Mr. Nave had been given a lease on these lands, so there was quite a bit of discussion back and forth. Mr. Miller came and put in his objection and applied for the land himself… so after much discussion the superintendent told [Nave] to bring the Indians in…. And instead of the major talking to the Indians at the time when Mr. Nave brought them in…he asked me what did the Indians want to do, to express their wishes to Mr. Nave, and [the major] said, ‘Draw up the papers.” I went ahead and drew up the leases and after I drew up the leases, why Mr. Six [the chief clerk] became very antagonistic, and he evidently was working with Mr. H.B. Miller, and Mr. Six then had the Indians come into the office, and standing right there at my counter in my office, why, he tried to get these Indians, Elizabeth and Susan Johnson, to sign up a blank lease or blank lease forms telling them it was necessary for him to have their signature on these blank forms in order to take the matter up at Washington, D.C…. Mr. Six did not secure the Indians’ signatures. 107 Even under such heavy manipulation, the women persisted. They decided to work their own land. Nave went and secured land outside of the Indian agency, and Elizabeth’s husband, Napoleon began working on their allotment. The representative asked Woodhouse, “Were they permitted to farm?” Answer, “They were not…when it got time to get water for [the] crop the superintendent told him he would not allow the water to be turned in the ditch.” More than a threat, Woodhouse testified that she heard the superintendent call to the office of irrigation and tell them that “no water should be turned on.” Without access to water, the women were forced to lease to Miller. Miller got the allotment after Napoleon had already started working on it with 107 Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 18-20. 57 no recompense for his labor, and paid $8 per acre, a lower price than Nave had offered, and on top of that he received a $100 discount for the delay in the season. 108 Though the case of the Johnson women made Woodhouse want to look away, it was not the case that made her walk away. Not long after that interaction she and another agent, Mr. Six, filed a complaint about the superintendent for allowing a known and convicted alcohol producer to reside on an allotment for free. 109 As was a common practice of the federal agency, rather than address the issue, Six and Woodhouse were moved to other Indian Agencies around the country. 110 Rather than move, Woodhouse quit her job and continued to live in the region. Only after the case came to light at the 1928 Senate hearings, did the Federal government hold Estep responsible for the case of the alcohol producer. 111 Though these stories firmly expose the tactics used against Indigenous people we cannot ignore the manipulation of whites who were perceived as outsiders in some of these cases. To understand this dynamic, I lay out the experience of a white farmer, Philip Dienes, as he testified at the Senate hearings of 1928. When Deines signed a lease for land on the reservation from H.B. Miller and Fred Houghton, he did not know that he was signing a sharecropping lease. This 108 Nave offered $9/acre x 80 acres, which comes to $720 per year; Miller offered $8/acre and with his discount paid only $540 for that year. Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 20-22. 109 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 55-58. 110 Nealey Olney testified that his work and advocacy with Indian land never ended and in large part was because the superintendent would not address issues and even with federal oversight, issues were often “whitewashed.” Senator Dill explained during Olney’s testimony that “this bureau system, of course, develops in the Indian Service more dilly-dallying and more arbitrary officials than any other service because they are sort of guardians….Unless they commit a crime they could not get rid of them.” US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 144. 111 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 36-37/ 58 meant that the land did not belong to Miller or Houghton as he was led to believe, but rather to a Yakama Indian on the reservation. In this way Miller managed many leases without farming them himself. By leasing land through family members such as Houghton or through the bank, he managed hundreds of acres of land and benefited the most from the land leases. Sharecropping leases were institutionalized in 1909 and were intended to “discriminate against the Japanese on the reservations, [because] the farmers made great objection to Japanese farming on the reservation.” 112 Remarkably, a tactic used to limit Japanese success on the reservation also served handy to discriminate and exploit other outsiders. The terms of the lease were such that Deines was to pay one third of his gross income from the farm. In three years, his gross earnings were over $18,000 from which he paid Miller just over $6000. Aside from paying from his gross earnings, Deines also claimed to have lost several thousands of dollars when Miller offered to sell his potato crop but never paid him. He estimated that amount to be another $18,000. Later, Deines found out that Miller and Houghton were the middlemen, and to his disgust, that the Indian landowner earned only $2 per acre from the lease, a total of just over $400 for the three years. Miller and Houghton had positioned themselves at the top by using the sharecropping lease loophole. When Deines complained to the Indian Agent, Miller advocated for him to be barred from leasing any other Indian allotments. Deines then tried to gain a lease directly through an Indian man, William Dewey Howtopat who went to the agency to arrange for it. Howtopat wrote Deines a letter in response, short but to the point: Dear Sir: Well, I’m going to let you know. Mr. Estep, He don’t like you. I was at agency, and he told me the land is belongs to Fred Howden [Houghton]. Signed, Wm. 112 Immel testimony in Woodhouse testimony in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 167. 59 Dewey Howtopat.” 113 Dienes was not only denied a renewal but any lease through the agency; brushed aside without a reason until he found an Indian who leased their land without the agency’s oversight. 114 By using the same tactics farmers used on Japanese immigrants, Miller manipulated and excluded Deines from the lease. 115 Miller and Houghton found it convenient to use this same system to bar Deines from keeping his profits and paying the Indian a fair and just value for the land. Taking the stories of how the men in power orchestrated, institutionalized, and maintained the low value of the land can tell us much about who benefited from this network and the gradations of power. Although Philip Deines was white, he did not serve the hierarchy and his complaining got him pushed out of the region. Nave was also a white man whose desires for land were undermined because his willingness to pay a higher price per acre impacted the land value throughout the region. 116 To create this hierarchy the white men in power used the logics of removal and a hierarchy of labor to exclude others based on labor, class, and race. And when pushed, they were intent on keeping the value of land low. This would make it so that they could easily access the land as leases, and they made every attempt to maintain that balance. In 1925 it is reported that Miller had at least 160 leases that he directly or indirectly managed and benefited from. Some of those leases were under his name, the names of his relatives, or through the bank. Surely, there were financial reasons for keeping a network tight and excluding others, even 113 Letter entered as “Exhibit 1” in testimony of Deines, in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 10. See testimony of Philip Deines in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 10. 114 Testimony of Deines, in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 10. 115 See testimony of J. H. Immel, US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 167. 116 See testimony of Philip Deines in US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 6-9. 60 whites, from benefiting from it. But we should also consider that this is done in the name of paternalism. The outspoken reason of keeping land value was that no one would purchase the land if it was too high, or that it would invite outside speculators who would drive the prices up and disbalance the worth of land. But the underlying reasons for manipulating low land value that even the superintendent shows that they placed little value on Indigenous people and had little trust in their ability to succeed. 61 Chapter 3: Refusal Figure 5:“Yakima Indian family,” A Yakama woman, two children, four wa’paas, and a cat. 117 Hattie Hoptowit’s Fragile Land Hattie was born to William Purns and Mary Goudy in Washington State in 1892. When she was seven, Hattie was issued an 80-acre allotment which would be held in trust until 1924. Her patent indicates she was an Indian residing on the Yakima Reservation and considered a Yakama Indian based on her allotment. In 1918, when Hattie was twenty-six years old, she and her husband Andrew Hoptowit were expecting their fourth child when the influenza pandemic 117 “Yakima Indian Family,” Archives and Special Collections - Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, http://exhibits.lib.umt.edu/omeka/items/show/1317. 62 hit the region. 118 Just about the time that women begin to feel their womb dance, Andrew passed away from the deadly virus. Mourning, Hattie continued the rest of her pregnancy in the care of her family and in-laws. 119 When springtime came she had her baby whom she named Thelma Hoptowit, at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in the nearby town of Yakima, Washington. May 5, 1919, St. Elizabeth Hospital Maternity Ward, Yakima, Washington Hattie Hoptowit gently touched her baby’s cheek as she handed her to the nurse. The baby was a week old, and Hattie was recovering from labor. She listened to the rhythm of her footsteps as the nurse walked the baby to the nursery. It wasn’t long before Hattie heard footsteps again; this time the heavy sound interrupted the quiet afternoon, and a shadow blocked the Yakima evening sun in the hallway. Hattie shifted in her bed as a man she had never met before walked into her room uninvited. 120 118 In 1918 there were several hundred Japanese individuals and families living on and near the Yakama reservation. Testimonies of the Japanese Issei tell of many folks dying, the hospital beds being full, and the morgue full of those who had succumbed to the pandemic. For more on the impact of the pandemic on the Yakama people see Clifford Trafzer, Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 188- 1964, 1 st Edition, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997). 119 The details of Andrew Hoptowit’s death were gleaned from his certificate of death. Andrew was male, Indian, married, born on 4/23/1890. His father was Dan Hoptowit and his mother was Martha Goudy. He died of influenza on November 1, 1918, at 6:30 pm at home. Andrew was buried in Wapato on November 4, 1918. Certificate of Death, Andrew D. Hoptowit, Washington State Board of Health, accessed on January 20, 1921, on Ancestry.com. 120 The story of Hattie Purns Hoptowit in the hospital, harassed and pressured to sell her land that I render here are details told in Hoptowit v. Brown. To be clear, the details were not disputed by R.B. Brown. His defense team disputed only the true value of the land but did not deny going to her hospital room, or bribing her brother, or coaxing her for hours until she sold the land. Details of the case are in Lucullus McWhorter Papers, digital materials received from Washington State University special collections. Copied from the L.V. McWhorter Papers (preservation photocopies), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Washington State University Libraries,” Collection number Cage 55, Box 16, Folder 128, part one. 63 Reese B. Brown’s large frame towered over her bed. He adjusted his hat and in a deep voice addressed Hattie by name explaining that he had come on urgent business. He told her that she had just received a fee patent on her allotment and with its release from trust, she had an irrigation bill of $7000 that was overdue. She either needed to pay the irrigation bill or the government would be confiscating the land for non-payment. Brown offered her $4000 for her land explaining that he would also be paying the $7000 water bill, bringing her land value to $11000. Perhaps he lowered his voice and leaned in when he told Hattie she could either agree to sell her land to him, or he could go to the Indian Agent and purchase the land from the US government. Either way, he promised, he was going to get that land but insisted he was there to help. To help convince Hattie, Brown had brought her brother, Philip Purns, to vouch for him. Only later did Hattie learn that Brown had bribed Phillip with a cut from the land sale. Perhaps Brown hoped to soften the offer by showing a relationship with Hattie’s brother, or he hoped that the gendered and paternalistic pressure from her brother would convince her more readily. By using her own brother to convince her, Brown compounded Hattie’s fragile state with fear and paternalism. Brown had also counted on Hattie’s vulnerable state. Indeed, Hattie was not only recovering from childbirth, but she was still mourning the death of her husband and counting the debt his death had left. But even if her husband had been there the matters of her land had always been taken care of by the Indian Agency and as far as she knew her land was still under a Trust Fee. Her inclination was to talk to someone, perhaps she might meet with one of the Indian lawyers such as Mr. Nealy Olney, whom she had heard of, or go see Louis Mann, the Yakama man who was an outspoken advocate and had a reputation amongst the white people as a “bad 64 Inj*n.” 121 Hattie later recalled, “I did not know that the Government had issued a patent to me for my land...I did not want to sell my land. I had never transacted any business. I was nervous and unwell and I begged him to wait until I was up and could talk to someone who knew about selling land.” 122 When Hattie resisted Brown pressed on saying, “No! It is yours and you must sell it tonight or not at all.” Exasperated, Hattie signed the papers at 11pm that night, selling her land for $7200 believing that Brown would be paying the irrigation bill that was due on her land. It is unknown why a forced fee patent was issued before the 25-year term limit or how Brown knew about it even before Hattie. She later learned that there was no irrigation bill that was due and that her land was worth three times what she had gained from it. In less than two months Brown sold Hattie’s land for $17,200, and before the year was out, her land was sold once again for $20,000. 123 Hattie had been defrauded of her land and cheated of its worth. While the stories of white men organized in a hierarchy tell us something about the gradation of power amongst the white settlers, the stories of Indigenous refusal tells us about sovereignty and continuity. It might be difficult to see Hattie’s actions in the hospital as an act of 121 The term “bad Inj*n” that Louis Mann was called by the local whites including the federal agents is attributed to Mann’s ability to read, write, and speak English and serving as an interpreter and advocate for Yakamas. He appropriated the name as an act of responding to the unfair treatment. See Emily Washines, “1909 Yakama Songs: Louis Mass as recorded by Edward S. Curtis,” Native Friends, March 2019, accessed 3/20/2021, https://nativefriends.com/blogs/news/1909-yakama-songs-louis-mann-as-recorded-by-edward-s- curtis. 122 Details of the case are in Lucullus McWhorter Papers, digital materials received from Washington State University special collections. Copied from the L.V. McWhorter Papers (preservation photocopies), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Washington State University Libraries,” Collection number Cage 55, Box 16, Folder 128, part one. 123 “Copied from the L.V. McWhorter Papers (preservation photocopies) Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Washington State University Libraries,” Collection number Cage 55, Box 16, Folder 128, part one. 65 refusal since, despite her reluctance, she still sold her land to Brown. But then Hattie found out about the details of the final sale and inquired about the irrigation bill. Hattie refused to be cheated and took Brown to court. To explain her logic, Hattie recounted her internal dialogue at the court hearing. “Here I am with four little children to care for and I will be left without any means if the Government takes my land from me.” 124 Hattie was unwilling to give anyone power over the future of her children and rather than have the government take her land, she chose to sell it. She took Brown to court to demonstrate her refusal. Some might wonder, if Indigenous people were so connected to land, then why did they sell it so readily? A flat answer would point to the fragility of people, the vulnerability of Indians who needed money, so they sold quickly and cheaply; it might point to alcohol; or remind us that like Hattie, they were uneducated, but these answers do not give a full picture of the system violence and settler logics that capitalists and land speculators employed to steal land. Even an answer that points only to bad settlers and greedy land speculators such as Brown, Miller, and others misses something. If we examine the textures of these interactions, then we’ll get the stories of how Indigenous people moved in response to injustice. This also allows us to braid stories together to see the interactions and connections between groups. Without connecting these stories together, they are flat and organized around a binary of white against Indian, and a tug of war of resistance with one side succumbing to the other. We miss the stories of refusal that color the entanglements differently. These stories, Hattie’s included tell us that there is much more than resistance in the matter of land selling than the popular and paternalistic narrative can tell us. Hattie did not give in; she made the decision to 124 “A Shady Transaction,” in “Copied from the L.V. McWhorter Papers (preservation photocopies) Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Washington State University Libraries,” Collection number Cage 55, Box 16, Folder 128, part one. 66 maintain continuity with her future and, believing that she was receiving a fair price, she sold her land. When she later learned of Brown’s deceit and the sale of her land Hattie confronted him. She testified in court, “Afterwards I went to him and told him that he had cheated me, that he had defrauded me out of my land. He denied all, and laughed at me.” 125 Unwilling to relent, Hattie took Brown to court and sued him for the fair price of her land, $12,000. Brown had a pattern of exploiting women. Though Hattie won her case the known millionaire continued his spree of land grabs and exploitation of women until his death. It happened on a cold January night in 1934 that Brown was driving on the reservation roads towards Brownstown, the small town he had established and named after himself on the reservation. No one knows what those last moments of life must have been like, but as he drove, he ran into a vehicle that had some material protruding out the back. One report stated that it was telephone poles and another that it was debris, and the popular narrative tells that it was teepee poles. Whatever the earthen material Brown was impaled by it; the debris pierced his eye, killing him instantly. After his death, the courts unraveled more cases of shady land deals along with a case of tax evasion and fraud that Brown had stolen from a wealthy white woman. The houses, condos, and furniture Brown purchased with the woman’s money was fodder for scandal and the newspapers kept up a steady stream of gossip from the trial. But the most shocking was the day in court when Brown’s widow produced the ashes of the missing millionaire. It was revealed that Brown had spirited away the millionaire to Canada where she died suspiciously. Her death and ashes had been kept secret at Brown’s home in Brownstown on the Yakama Reservation. 126 He 125 “A Shady Transaction,” in “Copied from the L.V. McWhorter Papers (preservation photocopies) Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections Washington State University Libraries,” Collection number Cage 55, Box 16, Folder 128, part one. 126 Court documents expose the defrauding of an elderly rich widow Sarah E. Smith who was worth 1.6 million dollars. Starting in 1928 Brown had taken large amounts of money from 67 may have moved on to exploit wealthier women until his death, but his co-conspirators continued in their attempts to gain more Indian land on the reservation. 127 Many of the stories in this chapter of injustice and refusal were reported at the Senate Hearings of 1913 and 1928 held in the region, stories that white advocates such as Mrs. A.J. Splawn corroborated. 128 But the evidence that best corroborates the archival records, are the acts the 70-year-old Sarah E. Smith along with purchasing for himself two apartments in Seattle, stayed in hotels, vacationed all over the world, and purchased furniture and vehicles for himself and his wife and adult son. Brown had started a romantic relationship with the elderly widow because of her fortune and slowly funneled her many away. When the IRS began looking into the financial matters of Smith, Brown convinced her that she would go to jail so he spirited her away to Canada for months, hiding her from any other friends that may have been looking for her. The only person keeping an eye out for her was her lawyer, who, along with everyone else, did not know that Smith passed away in Canada in 1932. Brown her had immediately cremated and continued to spend her money freely as if she was still alive. Brown stored Smith’s ashes in his apartment in Brownstown. Brown then died in 1934. When Smith’s lawyers went after Brown’s wife, they found that the Brown’s had bank accounts at ten different banks where he funneled Smith’s money. In 1928 Brown’s official accounts stated that he had no financial resources. Therefore, all the money that he had access to was attributed to him purchasing and flipping land. After Brown died his wife was appointed administrator of his estate and therefore was sued for Smith’s losses. During the court hearings, Brown’s wife presented the ashes of the dead woman, making national headlines. It was the first time anyone knew anything about Smith’s whereabouts and about her death. The court case dragged on and Smith’s stolen estate was only able to be collected in small amounts. Brown’s wife changed her name and moved East. See Wilom Tucker v Sadie R. Brown et al, William J. Slocum; “Case of the Rich, Rich Widow,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, January 9, 1949, ProQuest, accessed 12/17/2020; Elmer L. Irey, The Tax Dodgers: The Inside story of th et-Men’s War with America’s Political and Underworld Hoodlums, Greenberg: Publisher, New York, 1948, pages 166-173. 127 For details on Brown’s death, see “60 Days in Jail for Fatal Stop: Indians Against Whose Truck Reese Brown died, admit illegal parking,” in The Spokesman Review, Spokane, Washington, May 20, 1934, accessed through ProQuest, May 20, 2021; and, Certificate of Death, Reese B. Brown, Washington State Board of Health, accessed on January 20, 1921, on Ancestry.com. Narrative of the case regarding the exploitation and death of Sarah E. Smith, see Tucker v. Brown, 199 Washington. 320, 92 P. (2 nd ) 221 accessed at https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4224330/tucker-v-brown/. 128 Margaret Larson Splawn was the wife of Andrew Jackson Splawn, the first mayor of North Yakima and an advocate and friend to the Yakama Indians. Splawn wrote the book, “Ka- mi-akin: the last hero of the Yakimas” and published it in A.J. Splawn name many years after his death. For more on Splawn’s advocacy see Talea Anderson, “I want My Agency Moved Back…, My Dear White Sisters’: Discourses on Yakama Reservation Reform, 1920s-1930s,” in Pacific 68 of refusal that Indigenous people responded with in the moments of injustice. To be concrete, these hearings arose out of the persistent protest of unjust laws and parasitic land speculators. It is because of protest and refusal that the Senate hearings took place and why the records exist. But the repertoire of refusal acts as a witness in the lives of Indigenous people. They refused to give details of their lives; they insisted on movement as their lifeway; they made place though fixed in place; brought new lives into their worlds as they dreamed about the future generations; and even gave birth in a time of mourning and in the middle of a pandemic. And, like Hattie, they used the same systems, letters, and courts to bring charges against their abusers. Indigenous refusal shone a spotlight on one of the major connectors in the network of exploitation, the ex-agent turned banker, H.B. Miller. After the Senate hearings of 1913, Miller was fired for his dealing with Indian land but it wasn’t until after the hearings of 1928 that he was charged with “irregularities” and an investigation ensued. A news article publicized his abuse, H.B. Miller, Toppenish, Wash., banker, was allowed to use a confidential agency record book of Indian lands coming up for releasing; that he selected choice lands for his field of operation and then obtained leases at a low figure from Indians to whom the lands were allotted, later reaping a large profit by subleasing the lands to white ranchers. He is alleged to have handled as much as 920 acres in this manner either directly or indirectly through agents, thus evading laws which limit the amount of land on man can lase.” 129 Within a year of the 1928 hearing, Miller was fired from the Central Bank of Toppenish and shortly thereafter Miller died, his death certificate noted that it was: “[a] gunshot wound to skull- Northwest Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2013): 178-287. See Splawn’s testimony in the US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 199. 129 For details on Miller charged after the 1928 senate hearings see article, “Corruption Claims Mark Opening Boom of Senate Indian Probe: Fraud Charges Made Against Bureau Heads,” in The Mismark Tribune, November 16, 1928, on ProQuest, accessed March 15, 2021. 69 suicide.” 130 Hattie’s story exposes the complexities of having the sense of identity tied to land and refusing to be defrauded and Indigenous testimony brought the scandals to light. The Indians of the fourteen bands and tribes that came under the name of Yakama, living on the reservation and ceded land, had a complicated relationship between land and identity that was complicated by Allotment. In court Hattie was described as “very weak in mind and body and very much distressed” at the time of meeting with Brown. In sympathy with Hattie, a newspaper article published: “Mrs. Hoptowit, a frail little woman of twenty-six with four small children, whose husband had died in November 1918, is unscholastic, her education an unfinished fifth grade.” Describing her as frail, weak, and uneducated may have helped the jury of Brown’s peers side with Hattie but they discount the stance of refusal and the wisdom that she used in making her decision. Indeed, Hattie’s body was mending from childbirth and her heart from the loss of her husband but her day in court shows her continual refusal to being cheated. Brown used a lie regarding a technicality to defraud Hattie. Technicalities and loopholes were a primary vehicle for capitalists to defraud Indigenous people from their land. And though Brown had a parade of witnesses who testified on the price of land confirming that what Brown offered Hattie was a fair price, it was the land itself selling for $20,000 in such a short time after the sale that won the case. Despite his witnesses, land was the star witness in the case. It was as if the land had taken the stand, and her witness and value could not be denied. Brown had just so slightly twisted the truth of the technicality stating that he had not told Hattie that she owed an irrigation bill but was only intending to warn her of future debt that land carried. But Hattie 130 For details on Miller’s death see Certificate of Death, Harry B. Miller, Washington State Board of Health, accessed on January 20, 2021, on Ancestry.com. 70 already understood debt and land in different ways. She had been left with her husband’s death debt and the consequences of a future without her children’s father. Brown’s logic of removal was countered by Hattie’s wisdom and claim to remaining. Membership and Belonging- Counting and Discounting This was not Hattie’s last day before a court. After her husband’s death, Hattie remarried and grew her family. In 1951, at the age of 59, Hattie learned that she had uterine cancer. Only those close to her would know what this was like for Hattie, but bleeding and pain uncommon for her age may have sent her to seek medical care. Nonetheless, that same year that she found out about her illness, Hattie stood before Congress to advocate for herself and her people regarding the Act of August 9, 1946, now known as the Yakama Membership Roll. With little doubt, Hattie was moved by a sense of urgency to repeal aspects of the act that she and others felt were harmful to the future of their people. A group that called themselves the Yakima Indian Association (YIA) was at first a loosely collected group of concerned Yakima Indians who understood the Act of 1946 to be harmful to the future of the Nation. Hattie was one of the leading voices for the group and in 1951 was chosen along with Minnie Whitefoot to go before Congress to advocate to repeal some aspects of the law. First, they took issue with how the law was passed. The Yakama people had rejected the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934 but saw the Membership Roll as a replacement for it. They testified in court that the tribal council was “subservient” to the federal government rather than making decisions in the peoples’ best interest. They complained that voting on the Act was done with little community participation, and that requests for opportunities to discuss the tensions with the Act were denied by way of delaying meetings and scheduling them when many Yakama Indians were moving for traditional practices in efforts to limit participation. Second, 71 they were highly critical of what they viewed as excessive power given to the tribal council to determine Yakama enrollment and disenrollment. In section four of the act, the Yakima Tribal Council can decide to disenroll members if they “failed to maintain any tribal affiliations or a residence on the reservation or within the ceded area for a period of five consecutive years.” In 1951 after World War II, some Yakama people, like many other groups, had moved to larger cities to work, and yet others had moved because of family and tribal connections. The YIA saw section four as detrimental to the Yakama diaspora. And they took issue with section 1(d) of the act which limited the possibilities for children of diasporic Indians to be enrolled. The group wrote letters, raised funds, and sent Hattie Hoptowit and Minnie Whitefoot as delegates to Washington DC. Presenting written testimonies, the women advocated for the sovereignty and future of their Nation. Hattie colored the legal language of the act with real stories arguing that the act had created an “unnatural scheme which can cut off their own flesh and blood, and creates complex problems of who is to inherit,” adding that ,“The result is that Indians are encouraged not to find work or occupation beyond the borders of the Yakima Country and are encouraged not to become independent, for fear of being disinherited by their own tribe and unable to inherit from their own people.” 131 The rules, Hattie submitted, would continue to bound people to place without the freedom of self-autonomy. The same tactics of restricting mobility as an “active force of racialization” as Genevieve Carpio has argued in her 131 Hattie Hoptowit to the United States Senate, March 21, 1951, presented at Yakima Indian Membership Roll, Washington, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives, Eighty-fifth Congress, Second Session on H.R. 4005, A Bill to Repeal the Act of August 9, 1946, Providing for the Preparation of a membership roll of the Indians of the Yakima Reservation, April 21, and 22, 1958, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, page 52. 72 work is evident on the Yakama Reservation. 132 Using mobility to shape national and tribal belonging was at the center of Hattie and Minnie’s argument before Congress. They understood that the legal language, technical details, and loopholes created real consequences in the lives of the Yakama people. Hattie ended her letter before Congress with her signature and a note, “Hattie Purvis [sic] Hoptowit, (And 426 others.)” By representing a collective voice, Hattie spoke on behalf of others and on behalf of future generations. Hattie and Minnie’s refusal set the tone for the ongoing advocacy that would outpace Hattie’s life. The YIA went before Congress again in 1958 and in 1959, these times, without Hattie. E.J. Wilton, a Yakama Indian who was living in Tacoma and who had a personal vested interest in the repeal of the section that limited enrollment based on place, stood before Congress after Hattie’s death. Invoking Hattie into the chambers of Congress, he spoke, “How I happened to become president, Mrs. Hattie Hoptowit was delegate from Yakima…On her deathbed she requested that I carry on her battle. I could not refuse her.” 133 Relentless to her last breath, then buried in the earth of the Yakama Reservation, Hattie’s work continued. After she passed away, the group incorporated in Washington State and continued in their attempts to overturn parts of the Membership Roll. Their efforts were unsuccessful but not without consequence. E.J. Wilton eventually returned to the Yakama Reservation and had an unsuccessful run for Tribal Council. 132 Genevieve Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Place, (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 2019). 133 Yakima Indian Membership Roll, Washington, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives, Eighty-fifth Congress, Second Session on H.R. 4005, A Bill to Repeal the Act of August 9, 1946, Providing for the Preparation of a membership roll of the Indians of the Yakima Reservation, April 21, and 22, 1958, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, page 15. 73 When Wilson stood before Congress in 1958, invoking the tenacity of Hattie Hoptowit he spoke on behalf of the Yakama people. “Parents, children, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, etc. having been disinherited, and other injustices which have caused detriment to the rights of children and enrolled members, by reason of the enactment of said Act of August 9, 1946, and its administration by the Tribal Council.” 134 Hattie carried with her a desire to advocate for people bound to place through the reservation, fixed in place through allotment, then pushed out by the ways of the world. Just like that moment when Hattie touched her daughter’s face just before the land speculator and capitalist entered her room to “dicker” for her land, Hattie advocated for the future children, and grandchildren who could lose enrollment and access to their land because of technicalities. Looking towards the future and thinking about her own children, and all the Yakama children she acted collectively. 134 E.J. Wilson, President of the Yakima Indian Association of Washington State, November 7, 1955, Yakima Valley Libraries, Relander Collection, Ephemera and Clippings, Ephemera. 74 Figure 6: A letter from Hattie Purns Hoptowit (and 426 others) to the Senate committee in 1951. 75 Conclusion: Remain At the start of this chapter, I addressed Indigenous response to the logics that settlers employed to make the region into a fantastical agricultural haven for white farmers. The logics and tactics ranged from legal and technical appropriations on land and social and personal interactions with Indigenous peoples. From the start of the chapter, we saw that the Indians at Rock Creek refused to be counted in the census rolls. By maintaining the traditional way of life that they preferred they remained in control of their movement, their language, and their families; they took a stance of refusal; demonstrating their unwillingness to submit their power to the Indian Agents and US government. In contrary to this, Hattie’s relentless activism that lasted to the end of her life was in the pursuit of having the power to make a claim for identity. Hattie argued for place and movement as a defining determinant of belonging to the Yakama Nation. In both cases, Indigenous people used refusal as a response to the colonial practice of counting and discounting. Indigenous people refused allotments; refused to be micromanaged leaving the careful watchful eye of Father Wilbur to enjoy each other in community. The Johnson women refused Miller as a lease holder; Wallahee refused wage labor and preferred to work his own land using the Allotment system for his own gain. The refused the Burke Act which asked them to sell their land in exchange for water because they understood a continual and uninterrupted belonging to both land and water. Hattie refused to be cheated and refused the injustice of the 1946 Membership Roll foreseeing the impact it would have on future generations. If settler colonialism is about removal and its logics aimed at disappearing Indians, then Indigenous people and their acts of refusal are about remaining. Settler colonialism as a disappearing agent 76 fails because of sovereign refusal. And because many times it was in the moment of response, refusal was a move. 77 Part 2: Crafting Place The men take the steamed rice and run it through the mochi processor. It’s 2017 and the Yakima Japanese community has recently purchased new equipment to streamline the process. Community members visit from all over Washington State for mochitsuki, the New Year’s celebration the Japanese have been practicing in the Yakima Valley for over a hundred years. And although they have adapted to using a processor the labor of making mochi still brings them together and reinforces their sense of community. 135 Before processors, and as early as 1920, the men made mochi outdoors. 136 They started by steaming the rice in stackable baskets called seiro, then scooping it into a large floor mortar, or usu. One man then gently pounded the rice with a long-handled kine, or pestle, while a second one used a short paddle to guard the rice from splattering. After a few gentle taps, when the rice had released enough starch to hold together, it was ready to be pounded. Standing around the usu, three men took up their kine and, taking turns, pounded the rice. They started slowly and sped up as they synchronized the swing of their arms and the shift in their legs. A fourth man interrupted the syncopated pattern to quickly fold the mound. The dull sound of the kine meeting the rice bounced off the cold winter air. Under the shadow of Mt. Pahto, on the Yakama Indian Reservation, the Japanese men worked the rhythms of mochi-making in the cold. When the rice 135 This was viewed on my visit in 2019-2020, at the annual mochitsuki celebration at the Yakima Bussei Kaikan. Most of my understanding of the mochitsuki comes from community interviews and started with this article, Tammy Ayer, “Mochitsuki a long-standing tradition for Yakima Valley’s Japanese community,” Yakima Herald, January 11, 2018, https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/mochitsuki-a-long-standing-tradition-for-yakima- valley-s-japanese-community/article_02c23a1e-f752-11e7-810d-aff578631256.html. 136 The process of making mochi in the early 1900s in the Yakima Valley was explained in personal interviews with David Sakamoto and Lon Inaba, and further information from Densho historical website and images from the Yakima Valley Museum, Densho digital archives, and the George and Frank Hirahara digital collection. 78 was stretchy, shiny, and smooth, the hot mound of dough was taken inside for the women to shape. Figure 7: Three men syncopate the drop of their kine onto the steaming mound of rice. Three boys await their turn. Trays of rice steam behind them. A woman walks past the window in the house. 137 The Japanese community has been making mochi on the Yakama Reservation for over a hundred years. Early Japanese used such activities to remember their life and traditions in Japan, and to teach new generations of these practices, and in doing so, set down new rhythms in the agricultural landscape. It was an act that stemmed from a desire to practice memory and tradition that has become a marker of place-making on the reservation. In the Yakima Valley, Japanese immigrants experienced a constant state of temporal and spatial disruptions that shaped their lives and ethnic identities. From migration to settlement, they were met with social and legal obstacles that complicated their entry into American life. They navigated hostile and unfamiliar spaces; experienced hunger, displacement, and hard 137 Making Mochi, Yakama Reservation, circa 1917, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections, Yakima, Washington. 79 physical labor and endured social and racial exclusions. Despite the hardships, the Yakama Reservation was a desirable destination for Japanese immigrants in the early 20 th century because of the Yakama Nation’s sovereign decision to refuse the state’s Land Laws. Despite the hardships, the Yakama Reservation was a desirable destination for Japanese immigrants in the early 20 th century because of the Yakama Nation’s sovereign refusal of the state’s Land Laws that impacted non-white immigrants. 138 Through the treaty of 1855, the Yakama Nation maintains sovereignty, that is, the right to establish their own government and make decisions about their land and livelihood, though sovereignty over land leases was filtered through the Federal Indian Agent assigned to the region. The Yakama Nation therefore was not subject to Washington State laws and saw it a benefit to lease to Japanese individuals. Furthermore, the Indian Agency which was run by white men appointed as overseers of the leasing and farming of the reservation did not have an issue leasing to Japanese immigrants. Through the Allotment Act, the area had been gridded into individual land plots some of which were no longer under the jurisdiction of the Indian Agency, meaning they had been sold, some by questionable processes, to white landowners. In addition to this the reservation line was butted up next to the towns so that one’s neighbors could be on Indian Reservation or on ceded or purchased land, and therefore under different land rules. But the Indian Agency managed most of the leases that were held by Japanese immigrants through the mid 1920s. Leasing land was 138 Land laws of Washington State founding had been geared towards peopling the region, but the designers of the State had not envisioned non-white settlers. Once Washington law makers saw the potential of Chinese immigrants settling in the state, the Land Laws became more specific, making land available for those “eligible for citizenship,” and exclude Japanese and Chinese from land ownership. Because the Yakama Nation was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Interior, a federal agency, and not under State jurisdiction, they were able to exercise their right to not abide by the State Land Laws and offer leases and even land sales to Japanese. At least three Japanese families purchased land on the Yakama Reservation and a couple of hundred families leased land. 80 both cumbersome and expensive, and required a bondsperson to obtain. The struggles of making place on a land of contested sovereignty shaped the Japanese experience, their relationships, and their sense of communal identity. Working the land and practicing community knowledge allowed them to make a claim for belonging despite the barriers. In this chapter I look at stories of Japanese individual and communal acts of place- making in response to the resistance they encountered. Individual acts bring into focus the burden of racial exclusions in the everyday life, and the development of a sense of identity for both the first- and second-generation Japanese on the Reservation. Individuals’ stories demonstrate the endurance and courage they had despite efforts that limited their success and survival. Equally revealing are the communal responses most visible through the work of community leaders and embodied in their physical structures. I end this chapter by discussing the manifestation of communal and institutionalized response in the building of the youth center, the Bussei Kaikan, built in the center of the small town of Wapato. While Japanese were responding to racial exclusions, they were also depending on memory and knowledge to develop a sense of self and place. Crafting Place examines and analyzes the experiences of Japanese immigrants and their children born on the Yakama Reservation in the early twentieth century starting in the early 1900s. 139 The focus is on various members of the community as they respond to the limits and push up against the possibilities placed on them by personal and institutional restrictions. I use photographs, oral histories, testimonies, and poetry as evidence to center the collective stories and moments they valued and recorded. Testimonies published by Japanese historian Kazuo Ito in 1970 play a central role in developing the textures and stories of the everyday life for the 139 The Yakima Valley includes parts of the Yakama Nation’s Reservation. 81 Japanese community in this study. 140 In addition to these archives I use epistolary records or letters, newspapers, and official government documents. In my overall project I aim to look at the markers of settler colonialism and its logics employed to order land, living, and labor as they impact Japanese lives. In this chapter my focus is to demonstrate how these logics ordered neighbor and labor, and in turn, how the Japanese created new rhythms and patterns of belonging to navigate those orderings. I demonstrate how Indigenous refusal of settler logics provided avenues for Japanese immigrants to make place. I use the testimonies and oral histories to tell a collective story. Scholar A. Naomi Paik reminds us that “testimony tells a person’s individual and collective truth through the vehicle of the story.” 141 Many of the testimonies in Ito’s collection and the oral histories available through the Densho oral history project have been used to tell the story of struggling with the land and the exclusions efforts aimed against the Japanese. They’ve also been used to tell the monumental and important story of incarceration and life in the concentration camps during WWII. But I use these stories to find collective understandings of place making which shaped the life of the Japanese and impacted the development of the racialized agricultural landscape on the reservation. Avoiding the urge to romanticize place-making, I argue that making place is an uncolonized counter to the settler colonial logics. I weave through stories of dislocation and adjustment to better understand the textures that set racism in relief for the lives of early 140 Kazuo Ito, a journalist, started the project of collecting the stories of Issei in the Pacific Northwest in1965. He collected stories, testimonies, and images, and government documents to produce this work. It was originally produced in Japanese and translated to English in 1970. Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America, trans. Shinichiro Nakamura and Jean S. Gerard (Seattle, Washington: Executive Committee for Publication, Japanese Community Service, 1973). 141 A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), page 15. 82 Japanese on the Yakama Reservation. I use rhythmanalysis, that is, I analyze the intersection of space, time, and energy, to examine the production of place. 142 Every story reveals again and again the fragility of space and the permanence of desire in the face of limitations. This paradox is a marker of competing realities and a condition created by settler colonialism. Different from other forms of colonization, settler colonialism operates on logics of elimination with the express interest of obtaining land. 143 On the Yakama Reservation this logic is most visible through the Allotment Act and through the contest for water more fully discussed in the first chapter. On the Yakama Reservation, the logics of elimination worked to dispossess Indians from their land through legislation, questionable land sales, and contest over water rights. In the day to day lives the logics also influenced how land leasing was manipulated to give white immigrants and settlers access and to bar Japanese and other non-white immigrants from land ownership. Further, it structured migrant whites and other migrant workers, into a stratified labor force, thus ordering neighbor and labor. Japanese, and later, Filipino workers, were perceived by white settlers as a threat to land access. Some white settlers responded with legal, social, and violent efforts to block them from what they perceived an unlimited amount of land and water. The responses of Japanese immigrants can reveal much about the settler colonial 142 On place, meaning making and the production of place I follow the work of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). On rhythmanalysis see Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004). 143 Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research 8:4, (2006): 387-409. 83 logic employed against them as well as to demonstrate their efforts to remain uncolonized as immigrants on foreign and indigenous land. 84 Chapter 4: Fragility of Space Landscape of Exclusion The belief that unlimited land was available for white settlers was not new to the settlement process of the West and there was little room in the settler mindset to negotiate who belonged. At the turn of the century, the states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho played tag as they passed laws to bar Chinese and Japanese belonging. 144 British Columbia joined in their preoccupation for limiting Chinese and Japanese participation in their social and legal worlds. The legal efforts went hand in hand, if not preceded by violence in social spaces. Wapato, Washington, a small town carved out of the Yakama Reservation, was only a year old in 1907 and was not excluded from violence against Japanese immigrants. At a railroad post in Wapato, six Japanese trackmen employed by the Tobo company were violently attacked by “white youth rioters” who “were upset that the Japanese men were not purchasing goods from the local stores.” 145 The reports of the news implied some form of youth carelessness while excusing the attacks on the fears of scarcity, a message an audience could track. Scholar Kazuo Ito lists this incident as part of a “continuous anti-Japanese movement,” and historian Thomas Heuterman described the attack as connected to a landscape of violence. 146 Heuterman listed the attacks that preceded the one in Wapato: ● 1897, 20 Japanese workers badly beaten in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho 144 Ito, 157-162. 145 The Tobo company was the largest Japanese labor contracting company stationed in Seattle. They supplied contract laborers primarily to the Chicago-Milwaukee Railway and the Northern Pacific. See “Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Historical Sites,” Seattle.gov, accessed August 17, 2020, https://web6.seattle.gov/DPD/HistoricalSite/QueryResult.aspx?ID=1655591672. Also see, Ito, Issei, 175-176. 146 Ito, 175-176. 85 ● 1898, four Japanese workers threatened by a mob in Portland, Oregon ● 1899, when Japanese workers were discharged from work, a fight ensued involving 100 Japanese workers and the white workers of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, Oregon ● 1900 white attackers left so much blood after an attack that “the roundhouse [looked] as though ‘half a dozen hogs had been killed and their blood spattered in every direction.’” 30 Japanese workers had to be “spirited away in railway cars” to safety. ● 1907 a mob attacked a Japanese restaurant in Bellingham, Washington 147 Approximating these attacks by time and space helps to map the scale of violence against Japanese workers in the Northwest. These attacks were aimed at Japanese trackworkers who were by nature of the work, in constant mobility and displacement. They never belonged at the work sites where they were stationed and had little time and space to make place. It’s no wonder that Japanese men desired to stay away from trackwork in US and many of them sought work in locations where they could set down roots. Though the attacks in Wapato were related to trackmen, it set the tone for the racial exclusion that followed in the Yakima Valley that was aimed at both Japanese and noncompliant whites. The following spring, for example newspapers around the country reported on the attacks of W.B. Holt’s orchard in Wapato for his use of Japanese and Chinese labor in the Yakima Valley. One report read: Encouraged by whisky dealers in Wapato, with whome [sic] the Japanese and Chinese do not trade, hoodlums in that town yesterday destroyed a young orchard of 400 trees because Japanese and Chinese have been employed there. Threatening notices were also posted on the premises of the Wapato nursery and in other orchards, threatening the owners in the event of their continuing to employ Oriental labor. The orchardists have been compelled to use the Orientals because the white men will not work steadily, preferring to lay off so soon as they have earned enough to keep them in drink for a few days. Sheriff Edwards will take measure for the prevention of further vandalism and the arrest, if possible of those who participated in the work. 148 147 Thomas Heuterman, The Burning Horse: Japanese American Experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920-1942, (Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), page 5. 148 What is curious about this article is the statement about the whiskey dealers involved in the violence against whites to limit Japanese labor. This is something I have not looked more into but could be an interesting question to explore. The Republican. (Mountain Home, Idaho), 86 Another article printed the notice left behind by vandals: “Warning Notice. If you expect to sell your nursery stock to white people, do not employ Japanese. Warning.” 149 Since it takes several years before young orchards can produce fruit, the message to the local farmers was clearly an assault on their future and aim to force white compliance to racial exclusions. The violence was aimed at deterring white farmers from hiring Japanese laborers, but it did nothing to stop Japanese immigrants from heading to the Reservation in efforts to build lives and avoid contract labor. In that same year, Tokichi Tanaka, the Japanese consul at Seattle, visited the reservation with much hope to encourage Japanese living in port cities to move to Valley, a place with rich soil and fertile grounds for a successful Japanese farming colony. 150 And just a few months before the violence erupted, newspapers had predicted that it would not be long before Japanese would “do the greater part of the domestic work in the vicinity of North Yakma [sic],” anticipating an influx of immigrants to the Valley. The Sagebrush Desert Yasutaro Matsushita was 26 years old when he traveled with his younger brother to the sagebrush desert of the Yakima Valley. In 1904 when the brothers arrived at the port of Seattle, 21 March 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86091061/1908-03-21/ed-1/seq-1/. 149 East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR), 19 March 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88086023/1908-03-19/ed-1/seq-3/> 150 Tokichi Tanaka, served as head of Japanese consul in Seattle, from 1907 to 1910, in Ito, page 963, Lewiston evening teller. [volume] (Lewiston, Idaho), 24 Aug. 1908. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86091109/1908-08-24/ed-1/seq-3/> 87 the Japanese community had already formed strong networks to help new immigrants find their way. The prospect of steady and settled work was just east of the Cascade Mountains in the budding Yakima Valley where irrigation on the Indian reservation was systematically being developed and workers were needed to clear the land. 151 By train, the two brothers arrived at the unincorporated city of Wapato where they worked for the Northwest Development Company owned by Alexander McCredy and George Rankin. McCredy was the first postmaster assigned to the region and is credited with much of its development though he hired Chinese and Japanese laborers to do the work. Laborers put in the first fruit orchards and developed what would become the city of Wapato right on the Yakama reservation. 152 Only a year before the Matsushita brothers arrived, the still unincorporated city of Wapato was but a stop on the Northern Pacific railroad trail. McCredy had opened a general store near the post office where the mail was brought in by carrier. The total population was just over 250 in 1910. 153 In a few years Wapato would incorporate with just a post-office and a main street and by the 1930s would become the site of “Japanese Town,” with the Japanese population 151 Chapter one explores the complex work and contest for irrigation which had begun a major private and many private project then acquired and managed by the federal government on the Yakama Reservation. 152 The Northwest Development Company is the same as the Wapato Development Company which was started by Alexander McCredy and George Rankin. McCredy was the Indian Postmaster assigned to the area in 1885 to a post stop of the Northwest Pacific Railroad. McCredy purchased 80 acres of land from a Yakama Native American man names Frank Meachum, platted the land, then incorporated it as the city of Wapato in 1908. McCredy was the president of the Wapato bank, a Ford Automobile dealer, and an anti-Japanese agitator and exclusionist. On the Northwest Land Company see Ruth Kirk and Carmela Alexander, Exploring Washington’s Past: A Road Guide to History, (University of Washington Press, 1995), 147. On McCredy also see Newspaper clippings-Wapato-Transcript, Various, Yakima Valley Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11867/7397. 153 Newspaper clippings-Wapato-Transcript, Various, Yakima Valley Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11867/7397. 88 growing to about 300, about 10% of the total white population. The younger brother Sho decided to enroll in the Wapato High School, while the elder, Yasutaro, planted the roots of his first venture in the valley. With horse-drawn plows, the contract laborers cleared the sagebrush and laid down the first apple orchards on Ashue Road and planted the city of Wapato on the Yakama Reservation. 154 Though development contract labor was steady work, Yasutaro desired to oversee his own livelihood and soon had saved enough money to lease land through the Indian Agency. Even though attaining a lease was possible, Japanese immigrants later recalled that many of the plots of land leased to them were undesirable and most difficult to develop. The Yakama Reservation is about 1,130,000 acres of land, part of which is in Yakima County in Southwestern Washington State and is home to the confederated tribes of the Yakama Nation. The area is desert lands with an average rainfall of 5 to 9 inches. The land required development to transform it into the rich agricultural landscape that it is today, but also required a complex irrigation system to meet the demands for settlers. Yakama Indians had begun irrigation canals in the 1850s around the time of the signing of the Yakama Treaty but to sustain settlement and the work that the Federal Indian Agency wanted to accomplish, a complex irrigation system was necessary. While the laws to control irrigation were being developed to further dispossess Indians from their lands, the Japanese were entering into the area with little access to real settlement. In other words, legal issues around water rights such as the Jones Act 154 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives. See also, Newspaper clippings-Wapato-Transcript, Various, Yakima Valley Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11867/7397. 89 introduced in 1906 had little impact on how Japanese made their way on the reservation. 155 From their perspective, irrigation was something they worked hard at accessing- digging wells and canals to irrigate their spaces, then as the irrigation system became institutionalized, paying fees for water access. Their biggest concerns were related to accessing clean water to drink and cook with. 156 Japanese speculated that leasing the poorest land to Japanese immigrants in the early 20 th century was a way to use their labor to develop the land, and suspected it was meant to deter or limit their success. The desert was no friend to any settler. One man wrote to his friend in Japan of the May desert dust, “It is getting hotter and hotter here in Yakima so. It is fascinating to see this scenery where the strong wind blows, now building up innumerable round poles of dust higher than the mountains, which travel one after another from end to end of the desert.” 157 Another man wrote, “we struggled to cultivate the sagebrush desert extending as far as the eye could reach. Sheltered from the wind and rain in tent-houses or shacks, we worked from before sunrise until after dark, making every second count.” 158 But while it is true that most of the land on the reservation was undeveloped in 1910 when Yasutaro signed his first lease, even outside witnesses remarked that the poorest of the Indian land was leased to Japanese. 159 One observer 155 The Jones Act as an extension of the settler colonial logic of dispossession is discussed fully in chapter one. 156 See individual testimonies in Ito, 423, 424, 427, 428, and 436. 157 Letter from Kibun Miyazaki in Ito, 422. 158 Testimony of Naoshi Honda in Ito, 425-426. 159 Ralph Fletcher Seymour, “The Yakima Indian Face to Face with the White Man’s Prosperity,” The Christian Science Monitor (1908-Current File) September 14, 1923, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, page 6. Accessed 8/6/2019. Thomas Heuterman, The Burning Horse: 90 remarked, “No one else wants or could use the land and the fact that the Japanese can use it has proved a boon to the owners.” 160 Nonetheless they endured the labor arrangements for the sake of governing their own livelihood. Yasutaro along with other early pioneers “struggle[d] with the sagebrush desert,” planted apple orchards, dug irrigation ditches, and developed much of the agricultural land in the early 1900s. 161 By 1922, Japanese were cultivating approximately 12,000 acres of land. 162 Yasutaro settled on the Reservation just before the Gentlemen’s Agreement- a series of measures agreed upon by the US and Japan that curbed immigration and avoided outright Japanese exclusion like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. From 1907 to 1908 various measures were agreed upon and Japan limited passports to domestic workers while banning passports to field laborers. In return the US allowed wives, children, and parents to emigrate based on family reunification. Because of this provision, Yasutaro traveled to Japan in 1912 and married Kiyoko Amitani. The couple sailed on the SS Inaba Maru from Japan to Seattle, then by train arrived at their 80-acre alfalfa farm just before the start of the spring season. 163 Japanese American Experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920-1942, (Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995). 160 Ralph Fletcher Seymour, “The Yakima Indian Face to Face with the White Man’s Prosperity,” The Christian Science Monitor (1908-Current File) September 14, 1923, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, page 6. Accessed 8/6/2019. 161 Testimony of Sakirato Takai, in Ito, 427. 162 Short History of the Japanese Community in Yakima County from the North American Times, 1936 Edition, Year Book, Pages 42-46, Translated by Akira Takemoto, Yakima Valley Museum Special Collections. 163 Details of trip accessed on National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at Seattle, Washington; NAI Number: 4449160; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787 - 2004; Record Group Number: 85; Series Number: M1383; Roll Number: 15, accessed on 91 Photograph Marriages If Kiyoko Matsushita’s story is like that of other early Japanese women pioneers in the Pacific Northwest, it’s likely that she was a picture bride and that she felt the sting of disappointment when she arrived. Her daughter, Kara Kondo, later explained that Kiyoko was shocked when she arrived at the reservation. 164 The testimonies of other Japanese women moving to the Pacific Northwest to be with their spouses give a fuller view of what the adjustment felt like. Take for example Koto Kawamoto’s experience. When the driver had picked up Koto from the port in Seattle to take her to her new home, she observed homes so poorly constructed she imagined they must have been “inhabited by some beggars,” but the closer they got to the home she was to live in, the worse the structures looked. “We proceeded farther along,” she wrote, “and I didn’t see any Western house which was fit for me to live in.” She had not expected a mansion but was stunned by the poverty, the lack of amenities, and a bed made of “dried hay, that is, feed for cattle!” she exclaimed. “Suddenly an indescribable feeling seized me to think that I had come all the way to a foreign country just to sleep on hay. But even if I had wanted to go back to Japan, it would have been impossible.” 165 Koto’s experience helps us understand the disillusion, poverty and impossibility of choices that compounded the shock of wives who traveled to the US to be with their spouses. 4/20/2020. Gail Nomura, Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005). 164 See interviews with two Matsushita daughters, Marjorie Matsushita and Kara Kondo in: Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives; and Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Marjorie Matsushita Interview, Densho Digital Archives. 165 See Koto Kawamoto’s testimony in Ito, 256. 92 Consider also the testimony of Gin Akazaki, who recalled being wooed more by the idea of the place than her admirer who had come to her “all dressed up in dashing Western clothes,” and told her “rare dream-like stories of America.” When men sent photographs to woo their potential brides, they often borrowed a suit to look more appealing, or worse, posed in front of buildings and claimed a higher position in the world. 166 Akazaki’s admirer was dressed in fine Western clothes giving off a flair of economic status that was not the case. A year later as she traveled to be with him, she flirted with dreams of the place she would call home. “My heart swelled with hope; that is, my young … mind was more flaming with expectations of a new world than with anticipation of seeing my newly-married husband again.” But when she realized the dreams would need to be spun from straw, she was shocked. She explained, “even backward Japan was not so bad as this it was really living in some God-forsaken place. But my husband and I toiled on, sweating all over." 167 Though completely in charge of their decisions to marry men in the US, what women expected compared to the reality of rupture and change was often disappointing. 168 To find a bride, men often traveled to Japan alone or as a group on “site-seeing tours,” to narrow their search. Since traveling to Japan was a cost in time and money, men began the practice of looking for brides through photograph marriages. This is referred to commonly as “picture brides” but this is misleading and is often mistaken for the practice of mail-order brides. It is more like “picture grooms” since it was the photograph of men living in the US that were 166 Ito, 188-189. 167 See Gin Okazaki testimony in Ito, 249-250. 168 This was a contention that exclusionists had against Japanese. Outlawed in the U.S., passports denied to picture brides after 2/25/1920. Ito, 916. 93 passed around to entice possible brides. If a match was found, the wedding could take place without the husband being present in Japan, but women had to travel to the US to be married by the US courts. Women left everything behind with the hopes of an adventure in love in the US. The results were varied- some long-lasting relationships came from these unions, and just like relationships that started in other ways, disappointments, family problems, and at times, violence and heartbreak. 169 Women risked traveling to the US with limited options if things did not work out. Since Kiyoko had navigated her own sense of dislocation, she helped new brides arriving at the reservation adjust. She served as a mentor, friend, and midwife, since in many places Issei men caught the first generation of Japanese babies born in the US. 170 Kiyoko’s closest friends were the wives of Yasutaro’s friends, spending time together when the seasons got colder. Sharing seeds, stories, and advice, they formed a community of support and shared knowledge that endured the landscape. Photo marriages were a common way for Japanese families to get established in the US, but white exclusionists viewed the practice as a way for Japanese farmers to gain laborers rather than wives. Historian Yuko Matsumoto outlines how restrictionists first used the rhetoric of prostitution, comparing Japanese picture brides to Chinese “slave girls” who were smuggled into the US since Chinese women were prohibited from immigrating. Prostitution was used as a rhetoric to racialize Chinese as immoral and thus this script of racial immorality was transferred 169 For more on family and social issues around the photograph marriage, see Cecilia M. Tsu, “Sex, Lies, and Agriculture: Reconstructing Japanese Immigrant Gender Relations in Rural California, 1900-1913,” in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 2, (2009) and Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America, page 189. 170 For more on Issei men as midwives see Ito, 249-251. 94 to the Japanese picture bride. 171 The Gentlemen’s Agreement, however, allowed for it, therefore the rhetoric of prostitution lost public traction. The attention then turned to women working in the fields as a direct competition to labor and Japanese men were publicly disparaged as harsh and uncaring. 172 Thus, picture brides’ passports were banned altogether in 1920 making marriage arrangements more difficult but not impossible. Using matchmakers and friends, the language of arranged marriages changed to exclude the “picture” element, helped to cool the rhetoric around prostitution and women as laborers. Two things should not be lost here. The first is that Japanese women were in fact trafficked into prostitution. We know that as early as 1885, Japanese historian Kazuo Ito wrote that, “a number of ‘girls’ crossed the Canada-US border and entered Idaho as prostitute,” pointing to an orchestrated smuggling of women. He then noted that by 1895, there were over 100 Japanese prostitutes in the city of Seattle. 173 Testimonies by men and women tell the complex history of Japanese in the Pacific Northwest. This complicates the Japanese “picture bride” and Chinese “slave girl” binary that marks a distinction of morality between the two groups for the purpose of making Japanese an acceptable or model immigrant. The second thing that should not be overlooked is that Japanese women did work in the fields with their families, but white women, Native American women, and women from all other backgrounds also worked in the fields. Nonetheless, the invisibility of Japanese prostitutes and visibility of Japanese wives in the agricultural fields alongside their husbands made them competition for white farmers. The 171 On the concepts of relational constructions of race, see Natalia Molina. How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Univ. of California Press, 2014). 172 For one example of this coming up as rhetoric in Wapato, see Heuterman, 74. 173 Ito, 901, 904. 95 discourse of an ideal American family and the morality of having working wives were attempts to critique and racialize Japanese men. 174 Add to this the unfounded but popular ideas that Japanese immigrants had some imported or innate farming knowledge, and worse, that they were physically built for farm labor, and one can see how Japanese farming success became racialized in popular narratives. 175 The racial script of bodies built for certain types of labor was used to describe, understand, and establish labor hierarches. 176 The script about embodied farming knowledge and ability was supported by a generalization that Japanese immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s had come of age in the Edo period (1600-1868), a timeframe in which farming was the way of life for many common folks in Japan. However, this doesn’t match the ages and experiences of most of the Japanese pioneers who immigrated to the Valley and were recorded in the Yakima Valley 1935 census 174 Yuko Matsumoto outlines the campaign against picture brides in the 1910s first within a discourse of prostitution, then as a question of defying the Gentlemen’s Agreement since they claimed Japanese women were not staying home to care for the family but working in the fields and therefore “laborer.” The discourse of morality racialized the immigrant Japanese men as uncivilized and barbaric and provided a framework for constructing stereotypes of dominant Asian men and submissive Asian women- stereotypes that transfer as racial scripts to other groups of people. The practice was outlawed on February 25, 1920. Ito dedicates a section to prostitution, see Section Part 19: Girls in Ito, 765-775, 916; see also, Matsumoto, “Americanization and Beika: Gender and Racialization of the Issei Community in California before World War II,” 164. 175 Tim Asamen, “What Made Them Such Good Farmers?,” in Discovering Nikkei.org, March 7, 2017, accessed August 8, 2019. See also the testimony of Hiezo Hoshino in Ito, pages 435-437. See also the work of Masakazu Iwata, “The Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture,” in Agricultural History, Jan 1, 1962; 36:1: ProQuest, pages 25-37. 176 On racial scripts see Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, (California: Univ. of California Press, 2014). 96 taken by the Japanese community. 177 The census and personal testimonies from this time period shows a much younger immigrant who would have been born in the Meiji Restoration Period (1868-1912), a time period where children where conscripted to public childhood education. Additionally, the record reveals a broad variety of educational and occupational experiences ranging from banking, to businessmen, to carpentry, although there were a few who were farmers or trained in agricultural practice. 178 Since immigrants arriving in the US in the early 1900s were more likely coming of age in the Meiji Period and later, their upbringing would have been marked with some form of conscripted education and/or apprenticeship. 179 That common narrative might seem harmless, but it affected the ways that Japanese were treated, excuses the racialized fear of competition, and obscures the hard work that Japanese put in to be successful. Rhythms of Labor For Japanese to be successful on sagebrush desert, Japanese learned to understand the soil by working it. From clearing the sagebrush to harvesting their goods, they touched every part of the process and learned the seasonal rhythms of the region. Yasutaro and Kiyoko grew alfalfa on their lease, a high return crop but heavy-laden work. The work of haymaking could be done with just a few men as one man described it: The heaviest job was hay-making. About four months during the summer we cut hay every month, and after drying it for about a week we all gathered at one place and with four wires we baled it in 2’ x 4’ packs that weighed a hundred pounds each. Baling was 177 In translations of: Yakima Nihonjin-kai, Yakima Heigen Nihonjin-Shi (History of the Japanese in the Yakima Valley) (Yakima, Wash.: Nihonjin-kai, n.d.) accessed at the Yakima Valley Museum August 2019. 178 For example, see entry for Shinkichi Inaba, “he graduated from an agricultural school and started his farm in the Valley. Probably he is the only person in the valley who applied an used intellectual knowledge (text/book knowledge) of agriculture and farming into practice.” Yakima Plain-Fellowman Families, 1935, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections, page 11. 179 Conscripted education was instituted in the Meiji Restoration Period. 97 done by three or four experienced workers. Seven or eight of us, using two horses each, collected the hay spread over the hundred acres of land and brought it to the compressing place. 180 Another person remembered that “every Japanese man worked about four times as hard as any white man,” his words magnifying the weight of the labor. 181 For hay, or alfalfa harvest, success was predicated on having enough help to do the labor and hiring a few men was necessary. Though the Matsushita farm was about the same size as other leases- about eighty acres- growing and harvesting hay was sustainable amongst neighbors and with the help of hired hands. Figure 8: A man works on his alfalfa farm, Yakama Reservation, circa 1930s. The back of the photo reads: Toppenish Sakai, Sumio-san, Hide Farm. 182 A social pattern based on the culture of collectivity and the need for shared labor emerged as Japanese immigrants entered the Valley. Historian Ronald Takaki has examined this by looking at formalized associations, but I trace what this looked like in the everyday life. 183 For some, the pattern looked like this: Japanese immigrants first found their way to the Reservation 180 See testimony of Heizo Yoshino, in, Ito, 435-437. 181 See testimony of Jack K. Takayama, in, Ito, 424. 182 Hide Family Archive, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 183 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, (New York: Back Bay Books, 1989), page 193. 98 based on word-of-mouth networking, in search of Prefectural connections and possibilities of employment. Then, they often found an established Japanese farmer to work for which gave the newcomer an opportunity to learn the practice of farming, familiarize themselves with the soil, and save money, though the pay for day laborers was minimal. During this process they could also learn the patterns of selling their fruit and how to enter the market. The laborers would save enough money to lease their own land, send for their wives or family members from Japan, and in other ways get established. Even if the newcomer had limited knowledge in farming or a background in a different craft, the pattern, or rhythm of making place helped them to get established and learn new practices. The spirit of collectivity may have been a characteristic of Japanese culture, such as Takaki has argued, but it was created on the landscape out of necessity and strengthened by the rhythm of making place in the Valley. 184 Poetics of the Landscape It was because of these new patterns of survival and place-making that Masakazu Tomita came to live with the Matsushita family in 1920. Masakazu lived in Seattle for about ten years working steadily in general labor until the first World War when the economy took a depressing turn and affected labor at all levels. It was then that he decided to move to the Yakima Valley having heard about the possibilities of labor and upward mobility as a farmer. At about the same time, he had started an epistolary courtship with a friend, a poet and teacher named Teiko Matsui in Japan. 185 Moving to Yakima gave him the opportunity to save money to bring her to the US so 184 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A history of Asian Americans, (New York: Back Bay Books, 1998). 185 Ancestry.com. Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II [database on- line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2005. Gail Nomura, “Tsugiki, A 99 they could be together. He lived with the Matsushita family in the tent-house when his new bride went to live with him. 186 Teiko, who was known to her friends as “Tei” and by her penname as a poet “Yakuri,” left a teaching job in Japan to be with Masukazu. In high school she had fallen in love with writing tanka, a poetry style that she would labor over all her life, prolifically writing and sending her work to tanka poets in the US and Japan for critique. Tanka is a traditional Japanese form that lends itself across class and genders, so much so that it is known as poetry for the common person. Historian Gail Nomura describes the pithiness of the style as “concentration and compressions [able] to convey what might otherwise have required many pages or even volumes.” 187 What’s a poet to do with all the rupture, displacement, and uncertainty in her life? Historian Patricia Limerick reflects on Tei’s place-making through poetry, writing that: “Working in the fields or working in garment factories, Tomita crafted her experiences into tanka.” 188 Tei wrote: When wintertime comes I still wonder what it was That made me endure Those deep-abiding sorrows Grafting: The Life and Poetry of a Japanese Pioneer Woman in Washington,” in Columbia Magazine, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pages 29-39 (2005). 186 Though the Picture Bride system had ended in 1920, there were still legal avenues for reunification of brides to their spouses. 187 Gail Nomura, “Tsugiki, A Grafting: The Life and Poetry of a Japanese Pioneer Woman in Washington,” Columbia Magazine 19, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 29–39, page 1. 188 Tanka is a Japanese style poetry with a fixed form of verse that is five lines, with the first and third line containing five syllables and other lines containing seven. Tei worked as farmer in Seattle after she was displaced for the Yakama Reservation. When she was displaced from her farm, she went to work as a garment worker. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something In the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West 1st Ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), page 200. 100 Which wrung my very bowels 189 Her words reveal dislodging and interruptions and the longing for deep roots of place-making. Tei and Masakazu leased land adjacent to the Matsushita’s but lived in the tent-house located behind the permanent house. In an interview taken years after her time in the Yakima Valley, Tei recalled the fragility of their abode: The house was only a little better than a shack, being a two-room cabin hastily put together. There was no electric light, so I had to polish oil lamps every morning. We had one small stove in there which took wood or coal, and from time to time I picked up roots of sagebrush and used it as fuel, too. I got water from the well outside. In the coldest season you could hear the eggs in the cupboard in the kitchen cracking. 190 Although the structures were fragile, they were movable- their impermanence a response to the short and often unrenewable leases as the process of land leasing became more difficult for Japanese farmers. Built oblong, the structures were 10’x12’ with three feet high walls, the top half covered in a white canvas tent. The cost of a structure and canvas totaled about $25. Families then drilled a well though irrigation water was often polluted and dangerous. 191 The canvas was not firm, and the frequent sandstorms would cover their habitation with a fine red dust Japanese families would later remember in the concentration camps during the War. 192 White neighbors saw their impermanent housing as a marker of low family values when they were actually the option that worked best for a family on the move. When leases expired families put two logs under the home and with horses pulled the tent-house to another location. The 189 Ito. 132. 190 See Tei Tomita’s testimony in, Ito, 428-429. 191 Ito, 424-426. 192 Ito, 423- 424. 101 housing was as much a response to the political and social exclusions that limited the tenure of a land lease as it was an economic decision. 193 193 See various testimonies of tent-houses in Ito’s book of testimonies, including page 423 Jack K. Takayama and Yahachi Suzuki, in Ito, 423-424. 102 Figures 9: “Farmhouse in Wapato. When the lease expired, they dragged the house by horse or truck and moved it to newly leased land.” 194 Tent-houses may have been an eye sore for white exclusionists but Japanese also built houses and fences just like their white and Indian neighbors. This is in part because the leases signed under the Indian Agency required the lessees to improve on the land by dedicating certain amounts of money on the grounds for building structures and fences. While Japanese families sometimes made do by building movable houses, white families also left places undeveloped as some testified at the 1914 and 1928 Congressional hearings. 195 But Japanese did build and rebuild houses as proven by photographic evidence. The Yakima Valley Museum, for example, has dozens of family photos of established homes built on the reservation including the Hide Family Archive. This says much about what the actual fears were that whites had against their neighbors. It wasn’t so much that Japanese were different than whites but that Japanese families 194 Ito, 249-250. 195 Survey of Conditions of Indians in the United States, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee of Indian Affairs United Sates Senate, Seventieth Congress, Second Session, Part 1, Yakima, Washington and Klamath Falls, Oregon, November 12, 13, and 16, 1928. 103 could assimilate, have healthy and thriving families, and having successful farms, and building strong communities was the real fear that exclusionists had against them. Therefore, although the tent-house came up as an issue of contention, the photographic evidence reveals that Japanese were much more alike to their neighbors who were attempting to expel them than they were different. Foreign to the reservation just like their white neighbors, Japanese were attempting to lay down new patterns of belonging as the soil was being transformed into a rich agricultural landscape. Figure 10: Neighbors came together to rebuild the Mizuta’s house after a house fire. Circa 1941 on the Yakama Reservation. 196 Tei built a friendship with the Matsushita’s since she and Kiyoko raised their children together and made meals for the hired men, but the heat of the summer in the middle of the plains (what Japanese pioneers called the area), was a lonely and desolate place. 197 Working in 196 “Rebuilding,” Hide family archive, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 197 See Yakima Plain-Fellowman Families, 1935, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 104 the summer heat wore out the workers and pushed the Tomita’s to sleep outdoors under the peach tree. But her poetry did not romanticize the rustic quality of the desert. Desert to farmland, Sagebrush to fruit trees. They say, A transformation. But sand in the windy air… Nobody can transform it. 198 Tei’s words express the experience with the rurality of place. Her words measured the distance in the desert. Five miles on all sides, And not one neighbor in sight! How many days gone? How many days still to come? Today just like all the rest 199 Though she lived on the Matsushita lease, she longed for the connection to a broader community, a connection that was more pronounced during long days of summer labor and exasperated by the exclusion efforts happening in the Valley and across the State. Sending her poetry to writers in Seattle, Tacoma, and Japan was a way of bringing poets together through sharing, critique, and publishing of her work. Tei was not the only poet in the region. Shintaro Honda (penname Kaho) had started a senryu poetry club in 1910 in the city of North Yakima nearby. The members met regularly to hear each other’s poetry, offer critiques, and choose their favorites. Senryu is like haiku in structure, but favors a humanistic touch, highlights human foibles, and can be dark or sinical while haiku favors the more serious. The club lasted for several years in Yakima until Honda moved back to Japan then again to Seattle where he once again formed a group. He reported that 198 Ito. 199 See Teiko Tomita’s poetry throughout the telling of testimonies in Ito, 429. 105 his friends in Japan were surprised that their traditions were being practiced in the US. A memorial for Honda is erected on private property in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle in honor of his poetic contributions. 200 The literature practice of poetry was published in Japanese newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest and aided in the discursive understanding of dislocations, adjustments, and settlement. It was in the wintertime that the Japanese neighbors had an opportunity to form relationships. “In Wapato, when we heard the voice of November, the land would be covered with snow and we couldn’t work in the fields anymore,” remembered Yoshiko Ueda. 201 The feelings of distance and longing were made palpable in slower days. Another man remembered harvest times marked by hard work, little sleep, and mundane foods, but winter was a time to think about home. “When new year came we made mochi (rice cakes) with a mallet. We all longed for home, and tossed off sake, singing songs and enjoying the new year mood,” he recalled. 202 Tei and Masakazu Tomita, and the Matsushita family took advantage of the slower days, making traditional foods and building on their friendships. Kara Kondo warmly remembered the long mornings of excited discussions between her father and his friends, and women visiting with her mother, sharing and seeking advice. Supporting each other, longing for family, and remembering life in Japan, they pulled on community knowledge to draw close to one another and in doing so turned their attention to the new futures they were collectively building. Tei wrote: 200 Ito, 855, 912, 922. 201 Ito, 425. 202 See testimony of Yoshiichi Tanaka in, Ito, 328. 106 Whirl of winter snow I tolerate, believing In implicit spring 203 The poetic and material practices of the Japanese immigrants helped them sow new memories, both collectively and individually, and allowed them to believe in the possibilities of the future. With nights so cold the eggs cracked in the cupboard, the Matsushita’s spent the days with neighbors, mending their bodies and warming their lives together. Friends gathered at the Matsushita home to discuss politics, planting, and poetry while a new generation of children gathered at their feet. 203 Ito, 428. 107 Chapter 5: Ordering Neighbor and Labor Settler Colonial Logics What may be less visible at this point of the chapter is the settler colonial logics that ordered land, living, and labor in the lives of the Japanese and the Reservation. This might be more visible in the first chapter that addresses the Movement and Place-Making of Yakama Indians but zooming out could help us situate the rhythms of place-making and belonging that the Japanese had set in place. Additionally, it helps us answer the critical questions of Japanese as colonial actors. 204 To ask and answer these questions this section analyzes the ordering of land, living, and labor on the Yakama Reservation structured by the settler colonial logics. The most visible impact of the settler colonial logics on the Yakama Reservation is in the structuring of neighbor and labor. The Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Severalty Act, sought to Americanize and assimilate Indians into farming life. By taking the “roaming” Indian and bounding them to space and land, the Indian Agency could manage and quantify the success of the Americanization project of individual land ownership. The Act allotted Indians a plot of land, generally in 40, 80, or 160-acre parcels, for the development of the land and the transformation of Indians to farmers. Arthur G. Brown, the agent hired as the “Indian Farmer” or “boss” farmer, was to train, and offer support to the indigenous people on how to become successful farmers but spent more time on his own leases, so much so that some Indians were surprised that this was one of his roles. 205 Under the severalty act, individual plots of land were held in trust-meaning that the federal agency controlled the use 204 Geiger, Andrea, “Reframing Race and Place: Locating Japanese immigrants in relation to Indigenous peoples in the North American West, 1880-1940” in Southern California Quarterly, Vol 96, no. 3, pages 253-270. 205 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 92-101. 108 of the land for the benefit of the allottee- with the goal to release plots of land to individual Indian control. Within a decade, the Act had been amended to give the Secretary of Interior (and his agents) the power to determine “competence” of individual Indians which allowed the Indian to have the land released with a patent-in-fee issued declaring the Indian to have full ownership, title, and control of the land. But being declared “competent” carried its own consequence that affected land tenure, something that Indian Agents banked on for more land moving out of Indian control. 206 On one hand, competence provided the individual Indian with the legal right to control their land, but land in fee also subjected it to taxes and removed it from federal protection. It also left the Indian and the land vulnerable to deceitful land purchases from whites. At times, being competent could still result in losing land. On the other hand, deemed incompetent carried its own loss of power since the land remained under the control of the Indian Agent. For example, in 1928 when Congress heard testimonies of the conditions of Indians on the Yakama Reservation, David Wallahee, a Yakama Indian, was barred from farming his own plot of land for the convenience of the Indian Agents. Wallahee had been working with the “boss” farmer, Mr. Brown for several years when he decided he would rather farm his own land than put up for rent. After making his intentions known, Wallahee testified at the hearing that he was told by Evan Estep the superintendent, “You had better not farm your land your own self; rent it to somebody else.” When he decided to move forward and farm his land Estep once again reminded him that he was always to farm for Farmer Brown. Ultimately, Estep barred him from accessing irrigation and had to go back to working for wages with the boss farmer. 207 206 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 47-48. 207 US Senate, Hearings, 1928, 92-93. 109 The complaints that Indians brought before the committee ranged from being barred from accessing irrigation water, to manipulation of the loans and leases if they attempted to manage their affairs differently than the Indian Agent desired. Though some were successful, it was still under the paternalism of the Indian Agent. Under these complex tangles of land use and power were various arrangements through which the Japanese could access land: competent Indians who managed their own land and could lease to whomever they pleased with a private contract; Indian Agent approved leases, awarded through the agency; and Indians willing to engage in sharecropping relationships as they saw fit. The last of these arrangements were outside of the preview of the Indian Agent, or at times with the Indian Agent turning a blind eye to it. Competency, paternalism, and freedom were entangled in the land and conflicting sovereignty. But some Indians operated around the rules refusing the settler colonial logic, or better said, in uncolonized fashion, when they navigated the Allotment system that was structuring neighbors resulting in the checkerboard system of land ownership. Either by applying for “competency” or by sharecropping to Japanese, Indians could remain unbounded by allotment and labor. If they evaded consequences, they gained the development that Japanese wrought on the land: the permanent structures such as homes, barns, and fences, and rental income that did not get tied up with the Indian Agency. Moreover, the clandestine arrangements often benefited the Indian Agent as well. Therefore, as long as the plot of land was not tied up in a business deal or conflict that the agent felt the need to withhold from the Indian, they turned a blind eye since the developments looked good for the agency. Taking credit for progress, the Indian Agent did little to ban the Japanese sharecropping from individual Indians. The Japanese were grateful for Indians willing to sharecrop and saw it as a show of solidarity 208 Indians, however, gained the 208 Lon Inaba, interview with author, 2/28/2020, see also Ito, page 427. 110 most, operated outside of the colonial logic aimed at dispossessing them of land, and acted on sovereign desire for their futures. Indians, however, gained the most when they acted on sovereign desires for their futures and refused the colonial logics. They operated outside of the logics aimed at dispossessing them of land and built relationships with Japanese tenants. The checkerboard map of the Yakama Reservation is a visual representation of the neighbors and connections to the land, and in turn, a pathway to understanding how labor was structured. This entanglement of contested sovereignty structured the neighbors into a checkerboard – the term used to describe a reservation with a varying ownership, both as a mix of Indian and non-Indian, and land held in trust and fee lands- ordering neighbors by Allotment and competency laws. This entanglement of contested land sovereignty ordered neighbors and consequently, labor. While Indians were creating their own pathways of autonomy, neighbors were being structured. While Indians were attempting to enter the pathways of autonomy through Allotment while negotiating their collective practices of movement, neighbors were being structured. Land tenure and acreage were fixed variables in determining the type of crops and the labor needed for successful farming. White farmers who owned land on and off the reservation tended to own larger acreage than the small allotments that Indians leased to white and Japanese farmers. Landowners on and off the reservation had no term limits compared to land leases which typically lasted two, three, or five years. Both the amount of space and the duration of access determined the type of crops and labor needs. For example, white farmers tended to plant apple orchards but for a good profit, had to wait several years before they had their first harvest, and required several hundred trees and workers to have a good return. Japanese farmers, on the other hand planted row crops which gave a higher yield in less time and space, and with less 111 labor required. They hired farmhands, and neighbors aided each other during harvest seasons to maximize profits. 112 Figure 11: Mathew Tomaskin points to the checkerboard map of the Yakama Reservation in his office. Tomaskin works for the Legislative and Public Affairs at the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation of the Yakama Reservation. 209 In the Yakima Valley, hop farmers used Indian labor as the labor force in their harvests, work that attracted migrant Indians from British Columbia, Montana, and other parts of the Northwest. Farmers characterized hop picking as low-skilled, which stigmatized the workers and allowed them to get away with paying low wages. The apple farmers, on the other hand, hired migrant whites and characterized apple picking as “professional migrant labor.” Because of this distinction apple farmers paid their work force higher wages than hop pickers, but neither paid well and the labor was temporary. By 1937, hop farmers complained that Indians were not the ideal labor force, stating they often lost work time “attending various ‘Pow Wows.’” 210 Migrant Indians lived on their own terms and rhythms of movement and place-making, though it is unclear if Indians did actually leave during the middle of the harvest as farmers claimed. Migrant Indians moved on to other types of work such as picking berries in other parts of the Pacific 209 May he rest in peace. Mathew Tomaskin and the Checkerboard map, Latinos on the Reservation in Pictures, Latino USA by Rowan Gerety and Marlon Bishop, November 20, 2015, https://www.latinousa.org/2015/11/20/latinos-on-the-reservation-in-pictures/. 210 Carl F. Reuss, Paul H. Landis, and Richard Wakefield, Migratory Farm Labor and the Hop Industry on the Pacific Coast With Special Application to Problems of the Yakima Valley, Washington, Rural Sociology Series in Farm Labor, No. 2, Pullman, Washington, 1938, page 38. 113 Northwest and single white migrant men and Filipinos became the primary hop pickers. 211 But hop farmers preferred hiring large white families, complaining that single men had no roots but those families were also stigmatized as “nonagricultural workers,” while apple farmers hired smaller white families considered “professional migrant workers.” 212 Thus, hop pickers inherited the stratified stigma of being low-skilled. Apple pickers held a higher-class status, with apple picking reserved for white migrants up until the 1960s and 70s when the workforce shifted to mostly Chicano and Mexican workers. 213 Beet farmers utilized Japanese, Filipino, Black, and Mexican labor force. By the late 1930s, the labor hierarchies based on race and class were getting rooted in the agricultural landscape. The characteristic that allows the settler colonial logic to order neighbor and labor is difference which stratifies opportunities for belonging. Thus, these decades demonstrate the seeds of the stratified hierarchy organized around race and class. Large commercial farms required more labor than the Japanese farms which relied on farm hands (and not out of the critique of class differences within these structures), and organized labor. 214 211 Reuss, Landis, and Wakefield, 39-45. 212 Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942), page 60. 213 Even up until the 1970s, Mexican and Chicano workers were relegated to stoop labor and while apple picking and ladder work was reserved for white workers. Oral history interview with Tomas Villanueva, Founder, United Farm Workers of Washington State, Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/villanueva.htm. 214 For more on the stratified hierarchies of labor see, Tomas Madrigal, “Agribusiness and Mexican Farm Worker Families in Washington State (1964-2013): The Emergence of the Pacific Rim Capitalist Market Circuit,” (dissertation, 2015), and Seth M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2013). 114 The logics aimed to eliminate indigenous people from the land did so by transforming land into productive agricultural space and people into stratified laborers. These differences were exaggerated by progressive projects that attempted to reconcile or approximate Japanese to whiteness- the quality proposed by Americanization projects- which could be tested by a person’s character, their understanding of laws and government and their grasp of the English language. Progressive projects then were tools of the settler colonial logic intended to draw Japanese closer to whiteness while keeping them at arm’s length. It was not intended to fully invite Japanese into a homogenized world and could not truly make of them settler actors despite their ability to settle and make place. Plains Truth Centering the dedication to community through a lens of poetics is important for this work but might seem like an overromanticizing of their full experience. On the other hand, examining their experiences only through racial exclusions has left out the textures of their daily lives. This section looks at images produced by the Japanese community archived at the Yakima Valley Museum. Images were collected to preserve the stories of the local Japanese history in 2010. By using the concepts of rhythmanalysis, I look for the intersection of space, time, and energy to view how the Japanese community made meaning and set down patterns in their everyday lives. 215 Families mark their sense of accomplishment and pride by the images they decided to take and archive. The first set of images are family photos that take place in various locations. I observe the elements of space, time, and energy to analyze patterns and look for place making. In 215 See images. 115 Image one, the Konishi family poses outside, dressed in their finest clothes. Joe Konishi, the oldest of the children, sports a three-piece suit and looks off towards the distance, expressing sophistication. The family’s short history on the reservation is marked from the oldest to the youngest child but emphasized by the two vehicles that the family sits in front of. The Hide family submitted images two and three of their children playing with the neighbors, one with a Black girl, and the second with a white girl. The older girls play on the tricycle, smiling for the camera. They seem comfortable and relaxed. The younger girls seem less comfortable with one another, probably due to their ages. The Japanese girl holds a parasol while looking at her neighbor with uncertainty. The images depict interactions of typical neighbors. In the fourth and fifth images, children participate in the activities offered by the Japanese parents and leaders to round out the vibrant cultural life of their children. Four young girls in traditional odori dress stand in front of the parsonage, the living quarters of the priest towards the back of the Buddhist church. Kaoru Morinaga’s wife, Yorimi, taught young girls the traditional dance and had them perform for both the community and for white audiences in hopes that demonstrating parts of their beautiful culture would help bring racial understanding amongst the white audiences. 216 The dance was also taught by the teachers at the Japanese Association along with judo, sumo, and baseball. The second image shows the sumo wrestlers in 1935 in the Association building. A flyer hanging in the background lists the businesses that are friendly to Japanese. 217 Both images demonstrate the ways in which Japanese thought about their future on the reservation with the possibilities of their children expressing their culture and traditional practices. 216 Heuterman, 86. 217 Lon Inaba, interview with author, February, 2020. 116 Images five and six show members of the community enjoying a Sunday afternoon at the Wapato city park. The women sit under the shade, eating their lunch with chopsticks looking up for the camera. The girls take a turn at the relay race, legs stretched as they reach the goal and start their return to the starting line. These images evoke the warmth of the sunshine and a relaxed and joyful time in the most public space in town. The rhythms of place making are visible in their intimate use of public spaces. 117 Figure 12: Japanese family poses in front of their vehicle, circa 1930. Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 13: Japanese children play with their neighbors. Both pictures were scanned together as an archive. Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 14: Girls dressed in traditional clothing stand in front of the Yakima Buddhist Church in Wapato, Washington, ca. 1940. Hirahara Collection, Yakima Valley Museum. 118 Figure 15: The sumu wrestling team pose for a photograph in the Japanese Association Building. Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 16: Japanese women sit at the Wapato City Park on April 26, 1936. They are eating food with chopsticks. Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 17: Girls take a turn on the relay race at the Wapato City Park, April 26, 1936. Yakima Valley Museum. 119 The Japanese community participated in parades in the cities of Wapato, Toppenish, and Yakima, using the opportunity to make a public claim to belonging. I chose two images to demonstrate these efforts. Choji Hirahara is best known for his work as photographer during internment, but he was known in the Yakima community for owning and operating the Pacific Hotel and for his designs, artwork, and construction of the floats. These images demonstrate their commentary and claim for being the local and located in place. In the first image dreamy hop vines hang down over the children waving American flags. The float sign reads “Local Japanese,” clearly stating their claim. In the second image a ship named “Pocohontas” floats down Yakima Avenue carrying representations of the first envoy from Japan to the US in 1860. What looks like samurai soldiers ride on horseback alongside the float. Once again, the float carries the representation of their past and their future with children dressed in modern American clothes. Figure 18: Japanese community members pose in front of a float covered in hop vines with a sign that reads, “Local Japanese.” Yakima Valley Museum. 120 Figure 19: Japanese community members participate in the downtown Yakima parade. The final set of images are photographs taken by the Japanese community of Yakama Indians participating in the parades. Four images in the collection show the Yakama Indians riding into the parade in full regalia. A spectacular display captured, the back of one image reads, “July 4, 1928, The Indians.” While Japanese were in contact with whites and Indians throughout regular interactions while living in the area, it was the parade that gave groups an opportunity for spectacle, and to demonstrate a performance of belonging. Taken together, these images demonstrate the rhythms of belonging, of making a claim for belonging, of investing time and energy into the soil and cultivating the land, of having the public space to make a claim through their show of art, of teaching their children, and investing in the desires for the future. 121 Figure 20: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 21: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. Figure 22: Photographs of Yakama Indians marching in to Toppenish during the July 4 th parade, 1928. From the Japanese American Collection at Yakima Valley Museum. 122 Bad Business All this talk of rhythms could suggest easiness, but the rhythms made tractions in a landscape full of complex resistance. Yoshiko Ueda, a widow who farmed with her husband then alone after he passed away, recalled the precariousness of agricultural in dealing with the market and, at times, deceitful Japanese businessman. She stated, “Farming in Yakima was such that if you succeeded at all, you made lots of money. However, that kind of luck didn’t come around every year.” 218 She recalled that many farmers attempted to sell their produce based on their experience in Japan, they “loaded their produce on a two-horse wagon and clopped off to the broker in town.” But by leaving the sales to the brokers they placed themselves at risk of being taken advantage of. Luck, weather, and understanding the market all played a role in the success of the farmers. 219 For this reason Kay Morinaga and Kameichi Ono entered the brokering business but not without a learning curve with just as many gains as losses. Morinaga was first a farmer, so he understood how to preserve produce and strategized the selling of certain goods at just the right time for a maximum return. But the strategy was not always successful and when it was, white brokers blamed them of cheating the system. Individual white business owners also attempted to push them out of the market at times by withholding payment, and other times bringing false accusations against them. 220 Morinaga joined the Chamber of Commerce though 218 See image of Yoshiko Ueda from Ito’s book of testimonies PAGE. Agricultural records show that in 1938, onions were sold for an average of $7 per ton. See Mrs. Ueda’s testimony in, Ito, 251-252. 219 See Sakitaro Takei and Yoshiko Ueda’s testimonies in Ito, 256. 220 Morinaga relays an ongoing assault on his business explaining that as a produce broker, he was sued three times by dishonest white merchants. For example, one of those times he had sold potatoes that by contract had to be at least six ounces each in weight. The buyer did not accept five of the ten loads saying the potatoes were underweight and refused to pay him thousands of dollars due. Morinaga felt sure he would lose the case as the jury was comprised of 123 he was skeptical about the invitation of his neighbor the Rev. Hans Benz who was also the president of the organization. Paying the hefty price of membership while enduring racial exclusions from the same group, Morinaga was able to enter the market. And even though Morinaga was able to win cases brought against him and build a successful business, the social and financial cost of efforts to exclude him put a dent in his business. 221 Bad business also came at the hand of unscrupulous Japanese businessmen. Ueda recalled that after her husband passed away a broker named “Mr. O” defrauded her of the sale of her farm. “I don’t think we were the only ones who were victimized by him,” she later wondered. 222 Conversely, it wasn’t only Mr. O who had a bad reputation. Another person remembered that “There were even vicious brokers who pocketed the money themselves which should have been paid to farmers, and disappeared.” 223 Ueda gave up her farm and moved to another city with her children in search of different ways to survive. In retrospect, Morinaga speculated that the Japanese businessmen did not understand the market when they entered business and because of this many lost thousands of dollars as they struggled to make a living in the larger economic world. As such while many Japanese farmers built strong networks and were able to expand their all white farmers ‘who were thought to be anti-Japanese.” He described the opening day of the court case: “When I took the stand, I found a small scale and ten potatoes in front of me on the table. Soon the judge handed me a potato and asked how many ounces it weighed. I answered without hesitation, ‘Less than six.’ He handed me large and small potatoes one after another. With my long years of experience, I guessed the weight and answered certainly. All these potatoes were than [sic] weighed, and the scales proved me to be exactly right. I won the case.” Ito, 181. 221 Testimony of Kaoru Morinaga in Ito, 183. 222 See Mrs. Ueda’s testimony in Ito, 456. 223 See Mrs. Ueda’s testimony in Ito, 456. 124 businesses, the farming success depended largely on the market, the weather, and the limitations of the market. Figure 23: Yoshiko Ueda working on a farm she ran with her husband in Wapato. When her husband passed away in 1932, she asked a broker to market her crops, but he never paid her. “I took my children and moved from Wapato to Spokane.” Image caption reads, “Issei mamas worked in this style.” 224 To successfully sow into their futures, farmers in the region got intimately acquainted with the soil. Often, they were given the most undesirable plots of land to develop, with sagebrush desert for miles on every side and limited access to a water source. With dynamite, horsepower, or brute force, and with the help of others, they cleared thousands of acres on the reservations. Diving deep in the soil and acquainted with the various geographical features of the reservation helped them to understand and develop an epistemology of the cultivation. While Indians knew the region intimately and continue to have ways of knowing and engaging with the land, their relationship with the land was not based on farming, therefore Japanese were learning and developing these processes along with Indian and white farmers in the region. Where canals and ditches were built, where they could be built or stretched to, and what, when, and how to plant were all things that Japanese were learning and sharing together. 224 See Yoshida Ueda’s testimony in Ito, 252, 433. 125 Japanese pushed the limits of the soil, nurturing and working it with the limited resources of materials, equipment, and irrigation, to get the most out of it. White exclusionists had it set in their minds that Japanese left the land on their leases stripped of nourishment and therefore were terrible farmers, a narrative that still gets repeated. 225 But this complaint contradicts the first complaint that Japanese were such good farmers they were economic competition to whites. To date, I have found no evidence that supports the notion that Japanese left their leases stripped of nutrients. 226 I did find, however, evidence to the contrary. Before the Alien Land Laws, for example, Yasutaro Matsushita operated the same land lease for more than 10 years. Though the leases were short, he was able to renew the lease through the Indian Agent without a problem and he was sowing and reaping alfalfa successfully year after year. 227 Another example is that when the Alien Land Laws were passed and Japanese were barred from leasing, the Native Americans who had been leasing to the Japanese wrote in support of them recalling how their properties and lands were in much better shape and that Japanese were often preferred over white farmers. 228 225 Heuterman reported that one major complaint put forward by the Grange members in 1925 was that “their exhaustive method of farming wears out the land.” Page Heuterman, 74. 226 Conversation with John Baule at the Yakima Valley Museum, part of the exhibit, interview with Lon Inaba, third generation Japanese farmer who continued to farm same plot of land since the 1960s. 227 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives; and Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Marjorie Matsushita Interview, Densho Digital Archives. 228 Heuterman, The Burning Horse: Japanese American Experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920-1942, (Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), and Gail Nomura, “Becoming ‘Local’ Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906- 1923,” in Fiset, Louis, and Gail Nomura, Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005), page 62. 126 The Senate Hearings held in 1928 to learn of the condition of the Yakama Indians and their land provides more evidence that the Japanese were not stripping the land and therefore had to have short leases imposed on them. The irrigation supervisor engineer L.M. Holt testified that shorter leases actually hurt the Indians and that longer leases left the properties in much better shape than shorter ones. A longer lease allowed farmers to feel rooted and often resulted in the increased development of the land, compared to a shorter lease where farmers knew they’d be here today and gone tomorrow and investing less in the care of the soil. To be concrete, this is an important point because the fragility of place that Japanese dealt with because of short leases have been blamed on the Japanese farmers, exclusionists and community memory blaming them for being unrooted, that marked their early experience. However, this evidence helps us to see that the land leases were designed to work against settlement and helped to perpetuate the dislocation that lessees were dealing with. The Senate Hearings also tell something about this, when Holt Testimony of L.M Holt, the supervisor engineer, in charge of orchestrating irrigation in the Yakima Valley. Therefore, the response that Japanese had, the rhythms that they set in place, the public displays and claim to belonging were all a direct response to the settler colonial logics that sought to bar them from place. Organized Racism The Japanese experience on the Yakama Reservation became the thing political debates across the State of Washington were made of. Starting in the cities of the Yakima Valley and reverberating out to the larger cities, people were interested in how the Japanese community was thriving in the area. During WWI, the Rev. Hans Benz, a man of German heritage, started an anti-Japanese campaign after he was arrested suspected of being an enemy alien while on a trip to Chicago. He sent a telegram to the Yakima Herald, publicly denounced his arrest and pledged 127 his allegiance to the US. 229 Though he had been cordial to his Japanese neighbor, K. Morinaga, Benz took great offense at being mistreated as an enemy alien. He was released after 60 days in jail, and when he returned home, he found his farm in disarray and his sons drafted to the war. But Morinaga’s farm, undisturbed by the draft, made him green with envy. Though he was of German heritage, he was a US-born citizen and seeing his foreign-born neighbor unbothered and flourishing incensed him more than being jailed. Benz began preaching a fiery message against the local Japanese using his pulpit and the press. His own campaign died down soon enough, possibly because he was also serving as a lead businessman in the city organizing the Yakima Potato Growers and by 1919, had at least 70% of the local growers on board paying membership dues and selling potatoes through them. 230 Regardless of his personal reasons for relenting on the assault against Japanese, the local newspapers took up the torch and seemed bent on removing the Japanese from the Valley. 229 Hans Benz was of German descent though he’s been described as a German immigrant. The testimonies regarding Benz identify him as simply German, but Heuterman’s account of Benz calls him a German immigrant. The 1920 census record identifies Benz as of German descent but born in Iowa. This is an important distinction because the Japanese man, Morinaga, who testified of this account told this story many years after the account (the testimonies were collected between 1965 and 1968) Morinaga recalled Benz as “German” which Heuterman interpreted as a German immigrant. In addition to this, the news article also referred to him as a German immigrant. This says something about whether Benz identified as “German” and could say something about the sense of identity especially during war time. See Ito, Issei, pages 176-178; Heuterman, 7-8; Year: 1920; Census Place: Toppenish, Yakima, Washington; Roll: T625_1946; Page: 25B; Enumeration District: 209; Donald W. Meyers, “The Great War: 3000 from Yakima County signed up to serve ‘over there’” in Yakima Herald, April 6, 2017, accessed 8/20/2020, https://www.yakimaherald.com/special_projects/thegreatwar/from-yakima- county-signed-up-to-serve-over-there/article_a1f98e5c-1ad0-11e7-9f6b-733d5cc9beef.html. 230 The Yakima Potato Growers Association had been established by 1919 for several years and had grown stronger from 1917 to 1919. Media reported that 70% of the Yakima potato growers were members of the collective founded to aid in the production, marketing, and sales of potatoes. Pullman herald. [volume] (Pullman, W.T. [Wash.]), 16 Nov. 1917. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085488/1917-11-16/ed-1/seq-5/> 128 It was no question that even without Benz’s race-based anger serving as a catalyst, the Valley and the surrounding areas wanted something done about the “Japanese problem.” Media helped garner the attention of powerful men in the Valley such as that of exclusionist Alexander McCredy (the founder of the city of Wapato and president of the local bank, and Yasutaro’s first employer), Mr. H.E. Trimble, who had been serving as the Wapato city clerk since its start, and a local lawyer named Joseph Cheney who’s influence pushed the debates outside of the small city. 231 Notably, Seattle city councilman Phillip Tindall who was pushing for Alien Land Laws at the state-level understood that Yakima could influence the State and the Federal government on the issue. One Japanese man recalled that Tindall “barged into Wapato [and] began to stir up white farmers, farmers corporations, and local chamber of Commerce,” to banish their neighbors. Desiring to run on an anti-Japanese ticket, Tindall made a show of it both in the Valley and in Seattle. With the local Veterans Legions, farmers Granges, and at least on two occasions, with the KKK leading the way, one man recalls, “they shouted ‘America First,’ and claimed that ‘Japanese have taken over the reservation and robbed us of our opportunities.’ 232 The settler colonial logic that seeks to remove Indigenous people from their land and by extension bar any non-white persons from settling took on a new fervor after World War one. The American Legion in the Valley made an organized effort to banish Japanese following on the heels of the local exclusion efforts. Comprised of veterans and their supporters, spurred by nativist desires, the Legion started a campaign in 1919 to attract the attention of 231 Joseph Cheney was entangled with the Yakama Indian Agency and comes up in the hearings of 1928 as having benefited from interest charges that were difficult to place. See hearings, page 109. Newspaper clippings-Wapato-Transcript, Various, Yakima Valley Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11867/7397. 232 Ito, 179-180. 129 Congress. They wanted Congress to address immigration and the Japanese, more specifically, at the next session. 233 With posts all over the country including in the Yakima Valley, the Legion got their way, and the House and Senate held a special committee session in the summer of 1920. In Washington State the hearings were chaired by Congressman Albert Johnson who had been formulating his public and political opinion against Japanese and immigration since he took office in 1912. 234 Johnson would become one of the primary architects of the Immigration Act of 1924 that would set quotas on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and finally dissolve the Gentlemen’s Agreement, but it was the work of 1921 and later 1923 that would impact the Japanese on the Reservation more drastically. 235 The 1922 and 1923 Washington State Alien Land Laws limited Japanese from leasing, renting, or having land held in trust for them in efforts to bar them from farming in the state. The 1921 laws specifically barred them from leasing and renting land and many farmers indeed ended their land leases through the Indian Agency. In 1920 there were at least 130 leases held by Japanese, and the Indian Agent, Superintendent Don M. Carr reported that by 1921 seventy-five percent had lost leases and expected that within three years the leases would almost disappear. 236 233 Heuterman, 18; Fiset and Nomura. 234 Albert Johnson was also the manager and editor of the city’s newspaper, see Heuterman. 235 The 1924 Immigration Act attempted to deal with immigration by upholding the “barred zone” imposed in the 1917 act and added stricter quotas to reduce the total number of immigrants admitted. The provision that most impacted Japanese immigration, it denied immigrants ineligible for naturalization from entering. List the various immigration acts affecting the Japanese. List court cases that had already determined that Japanese could not be considered “white” therefore defining whiteness as European and that allowed the 1924 Act to specifically address Japanese. 236 Heuterman, 59. 130 Both of these land laws limited the leasing and rental of land to those individuals “eligible for citizenship,” using coded language for individuals who were white. But Japanese lease holders used a loophole and signed leases under the names of their US-born children since they were natural-born citizens. Knowing this, white exclusionists sought to calibrate the laws by specifying that this practice was illegal as it was equivalent to holding land in trust. Thereafter, families had to wait until their Nisei children became adults to legally hold leases. Since laws had already been stacked against Japanese setting precedents for determining that Japanese, like Chinese, were not and could not be eligible for citizenship because they were not of the “white race,” Japanese individuals who had been leasing land in the Washington State suddenly found their livelihood in a fragile state. When the laws were passed Japanese farmers wrote to the Secretary of Interior Albert Fall inquiring about leases held by Japanese on the Reservation that were set to expire the following year. His response to the Wapato Japanese farmers was shared widely in local and national newspapers: All Indian agents have been notified that in the matter of expiration of leases and in the matter of issuing new leases such leases must be made to American citizens, preferential rights being accorded discharged American soldiers of the late war. No discrimination whatsoever against Japanese is intended.…This Government through its departments has not only the authority but the right to choose its own tenants for property of its wards, over whom and over which property it exercises all the rights both of a sovereign and of a guardian. 237 237 Bars Japanese Lessees: Fall Confines Yakima Indian Lands to American Citizens” in New York Times; March 4, 1922; Proquest, pg 8, accessed August 8, 2019. This news was broadcast all over the country. Just two examples: “Veterans Displace Japanese Farmers: Hundreds of Orientals, Obedient,” The Christian Science Monitor (1908-Current File), March 10, 1923, ProQuest Historical newspapers, page 1. “Land Leases Refused to Japs: Interior Department Will Not Renew Them,” Los Angeles Times (1886-1922); March 3, 1922, ProQuest, page 13, accessed 8/1/19. 131 Secretary Fall invoked sovereignty over the Yakama Nation’s desires to keep Japanese as renters and completely disregarding Indian ownership and rights to their lands. The Los Angeles Times commented that Secretary Fall’s decision would “make him innumerable friends” since American farmers had previously been” seeking in vain for favorable leaseholds from Uncle Sam to farming lands.” They lauded his commitment to a “policy that American land is for Americans, or those who under our laws may become Americans.” 238 The New York Times also remarked on Fall’s “frank” approach for addressing “the Oriental invasion of Pacific slope agricultural lands.” 239 The popular demand to banish Japanese from the valley was echoed in Secretary Fall’s application of the State law onto the sovereign nation. Some Yakima Valley exclusionists hoped the new rules would mean that Japanese people would quickly disappear from the Valley. As Japanese had worried, several leases had expired and not renewed the following year. The Christian Science Monitor reported with a headline: “Veterans Displace Japanese Farmers: Hundreds of Orientals, Obedient to Ousting Edict, Leaving Yakima Valley Land.” The article read: “The expected exodus of several hundred Japanese from the rich Yakima Valley in this State has come to pass…The Indians, among whom the land has been divided by the United States Government, are seeking new tenants. These tenants will be white men, largely members of the American Legion, it is declared.” But a worry lingered that some who had lost leases had simply been demoted to laborers and had gone to work for other Japanese farmers. They hoped that with another hundred leases ready to expire 238 “Land Leases Refused to Japs: Interior Department Will Not Renew Them,” Los Angeles Times (1886-1922); March 3, 1922, ProQuest, page 13, accessed 8/1/19. 239 Bars Japanese Lessees: Fall Confines Yakima Indian Lands to American Citizens” in New York Times; March 4, 1922; Proquest, pg 8, accessed August 8, 2019. 132 in the following year, all Japanese workers- farmers and laborers alike, would shortly be expelled. Not everyone celebrated the changes. Several white business associations, independent truckers, and Yakama Indians denounced the Alien Land Laws or at least argued for a moderate solution. 240 The post WWI Depression had hit the Valley hard and the victory of gaining more land for whites did not immediately produce more farmers. The Indian agent and Superintendent Don Carr later complained that he couldn’t find a veteran to take or keep a lease and Yakama Indians explained that Japanese farmers had been faithful in paying rent and debts, while white men had walked off allotments without any repercussions. In addition to this, they had gained much development to their land from Japanese farmers. 241 The Central Bank in Toppenish, which had started an investment company to capitalize on allotment leases later confessed they had taken a hit in the early 1920s because of white men who failed at farming. 242 The changes resulted in Japanese families displaced: the Tomita’s left to the area for Seattle, the Kondo’s moved from their permanent housing into the Tomita tent-house and “followed the lease,” 240 Heuterman, 59-62; and, Gail Nomura, “Becoming ‘Local’ Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906-1923,” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005), page 62. 241 See the aftermath of the Alien Land Laws combined with the post-WWI depression in Heuterman’s book and in the Senate Hearings of 1928. Thomas Heuterman, The Burning Horse: Japanese American Experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920-1942, (Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), pages 69-78. This same issue comes up in the Senate hearings in 1928. Indians are left with no rent when the Indian agency fails to vet bondsmen or collect rent and debt. 242 This came up again after Japanese are removed from the Valley in 1942, white farmers took over Japanese farms and let them go to waste. See Boyd’s testimony in Ito, page 685-690. 133 moving every few years as settlement became more tenuous. But the changes in the law exposed the entanglement that Japanese had formed with the soil and the people of the Valley. Americanization Pressures Despite the limitations, Japanese continued to make their way to the Valley and those who had settled continued to grow and deepen their desires for permanency. Progressives armed with Americanization projects turned their attention to Japanese in the Yakima Valley. A progressive Christian group in the city of Yakima invited missionary P.B. Waterhouse from San Francisco to speak at an event aimed at the local Japanese. Waterhouse’s speech was published in the newspaper: Friendship is like Fuji San, the beautiful mountain. There are times when the mountain is hidden by the clouds that encircle it, but when the clouds clear away, the mountain is always there. The friendship between Japan and American is like Fuji; our clouds of misunderstanding may hide it for a time but deep down the friendship exists. 243 The way to clear the clouds, Waterhouse suggested, was for Japanese to try harder and do better, to learn the English language, and by learning to be good Americans. In his analogy, the clouds of misunderstanding were actually the Japanese needing to be transformed into something else. The onus of change was placed on the Japanese while the white community had nothing more to do than to stand tall like the mountain. For some in the audience, the message may have sounded familiar since Japanese communities in Seattle had started their own Americanization projects and were actively seeking ways to be accepted into belonging. To understand Waterhouse’s position, let us examine his words published in a pamphlet called “Japanese American Citizenship: Can a Japanese Become an American Citizen? Do the Japanese Want to become American Citizens?” produced in 1922, the same year he visited the 243 Quoted in Heuterman, 49-50. 134 Yakima Valley. In it he warned progressive Christians of a proposed measure to change the 14 th Amendment that would ban children born to Japanese parents from citizenship. Urging Christians to write to their representatives and encourage their churches to activate against this measure. He then reflected on what he thought was the Japanese problem. Much of the irritation, between Americans and Japanese, especially in the rural communities in California, is caused by too many Japanese settling in some one place. So that, although the Japanese comprise less than three per cent of California’s population, in certain localities the Japanese outnumber the Americans. This causes friction in the school and social activities of that special community. Furthermore, it tends to retard the rapid assimilation of the Japanese themselves. 244 For Waterhouse, a primary issue was the ethnic identity and ethnic enclaves that immigrant communities developed, again placing the blame on the communities rather than the social and political structures that ordered their living. His message to the Yakima Japanese audience was clear: the Japanese still needed fixing. He urged them to do everything possible to smooth communication with their white neighbors, to learn the language, and to accept the social norms. More concretely, he asked Japanese families to allow a white Christian woman into their homes for two weeks so that she could teach them of cooking, cleaning, and parenting their children in the Christian and American tradition. Eleven families signed up for the project. The pamphlet which was published by the American Missionary Association closes with a photograph of 21 young men with the caption, “Group of young American-born citizens in the making.” In the making of Yakima Valley Japanese into Americans, Ms. Nellie McKay, the wife of a farmer, was chosen to serve the role of Japanese “Mother.” 245 McKay who was herself an 244 California’s Senator, Samuel Morgan Shortridge had introduced a bill proposing a constitutional amendment on the 14 th amendment which would affect children born in the US and ban future Japanese children born in the US from citizenship. 245 Heuterman, page 49, 50. 135 immigrant, lived with the families for a week and instructed them on Christian character and conduct. 246 At the heart of Americanization projects such as this was a racialized belief that Japanese did not belong. White exclusionists expressed this belief in efforts to banish Japanese from the Valley, but progressive white Christians used this to inch Japanese towards assimilation. The progressive approach was to “mother” the Japanese families into American ideals, a paternalistic approach akin to how Native Americans were dealt with in this same timeframe. Ms. McKay taught the families how to parent, cook for, and clean their households. Stemming from the same racialized belief that Japanese did not yet belong, the training was aimed at pulling Japanese into the hegemonic white world through assimilation. 247 I suggest that Japanese families agreed to participate in the assimilation efforts because they were attempting to calm racism and attain the benefits of having their children fit in to the dominant American culture even if their efforts couldn’t render long-term results. But Japanese did not only get pressure from well-meaning people in the community to behave a certain way, but they also heard this message from Japanese leaders. The fact that successful anti-Japanese legislation in the Yakama Reservation would impact the State of Washington and could reverberate to federal change was not missed by exclusionists and supporters alike. The social climate was so heated that in March of 1925 the Japanese Consul Chuichi Ohasha visited the reservation to meet with exclusionists and with Japanese leaders. He 246 The 1910 Census data shows the family, George and Nellie and their two older children born in Canada, with three additional children born in the US. George and the two older children who were by then adults were marked as “Naturalized citizens.” 247 Heuterman, 49. 136 met with anti-Japanese leaders admonishing them. “Discard such ideals! From the President down to the children in grade school, everyone is now trying to cool the feelings of both Japanese and Americans…the United States is a huge country and is only in Wapato that a fuss is being made about Japanese at this time.” 248 Consul Ohasha also addressed the community, saying that the situation was “at least partly due to their own lack of communication with whites.” He urged them to be “careful and more reflective, and try harder for harmony.” 249 Knowing that a harsh response to exclusionists could tip the balance, Japanese in Wapato responded accordingly. Japanese were also reminded through acts of violence that they needed to comply with American standards. This is not to say that Japanese were bullied into accepting Americanization or Christianity projects such as the Japanese “mother” or other seemingly harmless offers. In fact, the projects whether religious or organizational were in step with Americanization projects throughout the country, many of which were aimed at assimilating women and youth first in efforts to change the family. But in contrast to programs in Southern California where Mexican women were seen a potential low-wage labor force, Japanese women in the Yakima Valley were seen as aid to their husbands and thus a competition to white men on the agricultural landscape. 250 But violence and the threat of violence did keep Japanese in check. Even violence 248 Ito, 180. 249 Ito, 184. 250 For more on Americanization projects aimed at women and youth see George Sanchez, Go after the Women: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929, (Stanford, California: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, Stanford University, 1984), and Laura Dominguez, “Courtyard Sisters: Settler Fantasy and Experiment at the International Institute of Los Angeles, 1914-1940,” in Western Historical Quarterly, 52, (Winter 2021), pages 414-440. 137 aimed at other groups such as Filipinos and Blacks was a push towards compliance with white order. When Filipino began entering the Yakima Valley in search of opportunities to farm, they were immediately looked at with suspicion. Race riots broke out in 1927, even before the infamous Watsonville riots in California. 251 One newspaper reported that the attacks were “a recrudescence of the attacks made against Filipino and Mexican laborers in parts of California and is said to present a problem similar to the Japanese immigrants in British Columbia.” Connected to anti-Filipino violence across the West, white settlers on the Yakama reservation and nearby towns took up action against them. 252 But Filipinos continued to make their way and settle in the Yakima Valley. Exclusionists saw them as a threat to white labor and white women and worked to bar Filipino from land leases almost as fervently as they had tried with Japanese and by transferring the interpretation of the Alien Land Laws to the new group. Filipinos persisted using their legal status as American subjects were able to obtain land leases they did so collectively; a strategy that helped them build a successful community in the Yakima Valley 251 The Watsonville Riots For a discussion on how historians have discussed the 1930s Watsonville Riots see Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, “III. From Single-Stranded to Braided Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Southern California Quarterly,” SCQ, Volume 101, No. 1, (Spring 2019), pages 39-40. 252 “Mob Filipinos in ‘Divide and Rule’ Tactic of Bosses,” The Daily Worker, New York, Saturday, November 12, 1927, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, page three, and “Filipinos Objects of Attack by White Laborers in Yakima; Ask U.S. Government Protection: Mob Methods Employed to Oust Oriental Workers in State of Washington, is charge made by delegation,” China Press (1925-1938); November 19, 1927; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chinese Newspapers Collection, page 1. See also, Gail Nomura, “Within the Law: The Establishment of Filipino Leasing Rights on the Yakima Indian Reservation,” in Amerasia, 13:1 (1986-87), 99-117; Eric J. Pido, “Property relations: alien land laws and the racial formation of Filipinos as aliens ineligible to citizenship,” in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 39, No. 7, (2016), 1205-1222. 138 though these gains were more acceptable to local white settlers when Japanese were incarcerated during World War II. 253 In March of 1933 white farmers held a town meeting to deal with the new immigrant presence and warned all farmers that they should not hire Filipino laborers. Soon after the town meeting there were six terrorist attacks against Japanese homes. A woman, Yuriko Ito, recalled: I’ll never forget it. It was almost 40 years ago, on the 13 th of April. With 5 or 6 other people I had been weeding the peas and had returned home awfully tired. I cooked dinner and finished the dishes, and as usual took a bath and went to bed at around 10 o’clock. I wonder how many hours later…with loud cracking sounds the house was shaking. I suddenly woke up. My husband jumped out of bed, threw on his robe and ran out. Beside myself with shock, I followed him. Just as I took a couple of steps out of the house, the second explosion took place. As I watched, pieces of flying wood were landing within two feet of my husband, and I was scared to death! It was dynamite that caused the explosion-some in the garage and some in the Dodge three-quarter-ton truck. 254 The Filipino couple they had hired to help on the farm emerged from the area, uninjured, and the families spent the night in fear. The next morning when the Ito’s assessed the damage they saw that the explosion had knocked part of the garage wall over the Filipino couple’s bed. Yasutaro Matsushita had hired Peter, a Filipino man, as his farmhand and his home was amongst those terrorized. Vandals started a fire in their barn and set a bomb on their front porch on March 15, 1933 at 9:30 pm at night. Only the fire was successful, and no lives were lost that night. Their children were teenagers when the terrorist attack occurred. Kara, one of their daughters, recalled the fear and the anxiety that followed the tense days, with attacks taking place over the span of two weeks. Some scholars have characterized these acts of terror as 253 Historian Gail Nomura outlines these struggles see Nomura, “Within the Law: The Establishment of Filipino Leasing Rights on the Yakima Indian Reservation.” Amerasia, 13:1 (1986-87), 99-117. 254 Testimony of Yuriko Ito in Ito, 187. 139 “Depression induced” though it was clear to Japanese that they were targeted for hiring Filipino men. Kara remembered that “all the ones that were targeted had hired the Filipino workers.” 255 The community felt the pressure to appease white desires and mitigate hostility. But it was their desire for permanence and for the future of their children that they were motivated most in these efforts. It behooved them find ways to mitigate hostility while doing what was necessary to bring about the future they desired for their children. With this in mind, the issues could not be resolved with Japanese making behavioral changes since their primary offense was their very presence in the Valley. Farmers and businessmen complained that Japanese lived below the standards of whites and that their greediness made them more successful farmers and that they could never be true American families. Although the complaints were disguised as Japanese being unconcerned with assimilation, coupled with a fear of miscegenation and integration, the logics that spurred the anti-Japanese attacks were grounded in racism. Therefore, the logics could not be satisfied with different behavior, only with the removal and banishment of the Japanese. But this did not stop the Japanese from trying to appease white fears on individual levels. We see this even as Japanese began converting to Christianity. While the new religion offered another social sphere for Japanese to engage in, it never quite invited Japanese into white Christianity. In other words, Japanese were not invited into white Christian spaces, neither did their conversions protect them when they were removed from the area and placed in concentration camps during WWII. Christianity offered them a new social sphere, but they remained segregated from white Christians. Therefore, no efforts could quite bring Japanese close enough to belonging even if they did all that Waterhouse had suggested. There were no 255 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives. 140 Americanization programs that Japanese could complete to be fully accepted by the community at large. That is why the Japanese Association provided their own entertainment and social programs for the growing Japanese community. Christianity created a new sphere of interaction but this and other efforts helped to exaggerate the difference between whites and Japanese and produced an entanglement in a two stranded binary that excluded in part Native Americans and people from other backgrounds. 256 Participating in such Americanization projects placed the Japanese in a binary that on some levels, might appear as if they are placed on equal footing as whites and that excluded Indians and groups of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. The ethnic identity of the “local Japanese” did not mean they were out of the woods but protected to some degree. 257 This binary also left out new Japanese immigrants, a point that historian Gail Nomura discusses in her work on Japanese responding to local exclusions. Even though there was a pattern that allowed for new folks to become settled the harsh racial tensions pushed some Japanese pioneers to denounce new immigrants, preferring to not disrupt the fragile balance of having appeased certain whites. 258 On this spatial and temporal backdrop new immigrants including Japanese continued make their way to the Yakima Valley in attempts to make place for themselves. 256 Andrea Geiger, “Reframing Race and Place: Locating Japanese immigrants in relation to Indigenous peoples in the North American West, 1880-1940” in Southern California Quarterly, Vol 96, no. 3, pages 253-270. 257 See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, (1996), and Geiger, 253-270. 258 Gail Nomura, “Becoming ‘Local’ Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906-1923,” in Fiset and Nomura, Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005). 141 Chapter 6: Permanence of Desire The Yakima Plain-Fellowman Families, 1935 Directory lists each family by first identifying their connection to their homeland. The name is followed by their local address, followed by ken, gun, mura, machi or sometimes cho, that is, prefecture, county, village or city, and block of streets. 259 A short description of the person, mostly men, follows the introduction of their origins. A sampler: he had a big gut and a spirit of ‘never give up,’ he is kind, a busybody, and fluent in English he is very elegant, polite he is known as “an uncle of the valley” he is known as a “Papa of the valley,” he moved here in 1889…in Seattle he encountered a big fire in a harbor he has unperturbed mind… designated as guardian of the Plain The entry is completed with a short synopsis of the family. Although the Japanese community was mostly concentrated in the small reservation town of Wapato, they publicly identified as the local Yakima Japanese- identifying with the larger city nearby, perhaps intentionally not making a claim to the smaller city or the reservation town. But in this document made for and by the community, the markers of identity were based on place- both the local and the distant- on personality, and on family. This stands in contrast to the public facing work that the community tried hard to portray to be accepted into their surroundings. At the community level the Japanese Association encouraged several measures to ensure that the public saw them as a the “local Japanese.” 260 These efforts were claims cloaked in 259 Translations by Mariko Takakura, Seattle Washington, paid for by the generous support of the ACE-Nikaido Fellowship 2020-2021. See archive, Yakima Plain-Fellowman Families, 1935, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 260 Gail Nomura, “Becoming ‘Local’ Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906-1923,” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and 142 politics of respectability such as when Japanese families accepted progressive Americanization program that sent white women to live with Japanese families to teach American ideals. On a practical sense the Japanese Association encouraged the purchasing of war bonds, raising money for community projects and the Red Cross, and donating money to the local school district. 261 The public facing persona was one that created and perhaps even reinforced the stereotypes that the white community had developed of the Japanese immigrants. On their best behavior, the Japanese community reinforced the model minority racialization of Japanese that has had a lasting legacy. Though this created a homogenous view of the Japanese community, many individual Japanese Issei continued to identify based on prefectural connections. This is visible in at least two publications by the Japanese community. Consider that the 1935 Yakima Japanese census first lists each Issei by name, prefecture, then town and street where they lived in Japan, before it tells of their arrival to the Plains and their wives and children. Again, in the 1970s publication of Kazuo Ito’s Issei in the Pacific Northwest, individual testimonies were listed by name and Prefecture. Even though their public facing identity morphed to a homogenous group which lent itself to forms of racialization, individuals continued to see their lives as distinct and unique based on other forms of identifiers. Taichi Fujimoto The entry for Taichi Fujimoto is short. “P.O. Box 187, Wapato, WAKAYAMA ken, Nishimuro gun, Esumi mura. He has an 80 acre farm and work very diligently with his wife, Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2005), 44–70. 261 Nomura, “Becoming ‘Local’ Japanese: Issei Adaptive Strategies on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1906-1923,” page 59. 143 Ayako, and they are improving their productivity. They had a baby in 1933, names Isao and caring him with a great love.” 262 Taichi was 21 years old when he made his way to the US in 1927. He was born in Esumi, Japan, in the Wakayama Prefecture in 1906. 263 Esumi is a small fishing village that sits at the Southwest tip of Honshu Island with the Pacific Ocean lapping at the beach and the mountains cradling the village behind them. Monkeys and wild boars would come out of the thick woods to raid the gardens and rice paddies early in the morning, and Taichi would chase them away on his way to school. 264 He was born in the Meiji Period when going to school was the norm for children his age. When he was given the chance, he earned an assistantship with the town carpenter. As a young man his skills earned him a prestigious apprenticeship at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Taichi then became an expert carpenter and opportunities to frame his future abounded. The Meiji Restoration period not only normalized and conscripted education, but it also brought about the expansive building projects that modernized the cities- a change that required skills and imported lumber. 265 After the first world war modernization projects in Japan grew exponentially which gave Taichi an opportunity to do what he loved and to travel. In 1915 there had been only 45 imports of domestic timber from across the Pacific, mostly from British Columbia, and Washington’s and Oregon’s coasts. That number grew exponentially to 435 in 1920, and, after the Great Japan 262 Yakima Plain-Fellowman Families, 1935, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 263 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress,” accessed 1/20/2020. 264 Fujimoto, Rumford.com/Isao, accessed 2/1/2020. 265 Fujimoto, Rumford.com/Isao, accessed 2/1/2020, see Thomas R. Cox, “The North America-Japan Timber Trade: The Roots of Canadian and U.S. Approaches,” in Forest & Conservation History, Vol. 34, No. 3, (July., 1990) pp. 112-121. 144 Earthquake of 1923, the number of imports grew to 2,105 in 1925. 266 Taichi embarked on the SS Milan at a port in Nagasaki, Japan in 1927, along with the sailors and firefighter employed to care for the ship’s cargo. It was on his third trip across the Pacific when they landed in Anacortes, Washington, about 80 miles north of Seattle that Taichi decided to abandon ship. He was paid $10 for his services, and he made his way to Seattle. 267 Figure 24: “Port of Anacortes Japanese Ship,” circa 1934, unknown photographer, Anacortes, Washington. Image of export ship from Japan docked at Washington’s coast. Used with permission from Anacortes Museum. It was October when Taichi first arrived at Seattle ready to design his next steps. He picked up an ethnic newspaper and found the story of the Ryo-ei Maru, a Japanese fishing boat that had been found adrift with the crew members tragically perished onboard. Taichi read with great interest that the men had been from Wabuka, a village only a train stop away from his hometown. The boat had been carried by the Black Current which flowed from Japan to the 266 See image of ship from Anacortes Museum, Anacortes, Washington. See Thomas R. Cox, “The North America-Japan Timber Trade: The Roots of Canadian and U.S. Approaches,” in Forest & Conservation History, Vol. 34, No. 3, (July., 1990) pp. 112-121. 267 Dr. Fujimoto, Taichi’s son, later explained that “immigrants from each of these regions formed their own village and prefectural associations in American as a way of providing valuable mutual help to their members.” See Isao Fujimoto, “Memoir,” in isaofujimoto.wordpress.com, accessed 1/20/2020. 145 Aleutians and then southward along the coast of the US. 268 Somber, Taichi knew he had come to a juncture in his life. Leaving his craft on Washington’s coast he headed East to the Yakama Reservation to build a new life. Taichi’s transition into the agricultural landscape and the Japanese American experience was aided by the patterns set down by those who had made their way before them. Within three years he married Ayako, a second-generation Japanese woman, born in Seattle but educated in Japan. Her primary language was Japanese as she had spent most of her young life a with her grandparents. She was able to legally sign a sharecropping lease for their family in 1932 and they leased an 80-acre farm on the Yakama Reservation. 269 Their children, Isao being the first born, would benefit from these patterns of place-making and recall the days prior to WWII like any of their neighbors. They went to the public school, walked to the Japanese Association building to take a class, wish for a nickel from their father to buy a piece of candy, and then head home to help on the farm. 268 The ship Ryo-ei Maru, had lost control in December 1927 and floated until it was found in October of 1927. The remains of 13 sailor. This story is told by Isao Fujimoto in “Life Lessons at 80” and it is listed as a significant occurrence in the chronology of Japanese American life in Ito’s account. Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress,” accessed 1/20/2020, and Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America, page 920. 269 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress,” accessed 1/20/2020. 146 Figure 25: Taichi Fujimoto farming in Wapato, Washington, circa 1927. 270 Isao helped his father on the farm recalling the heavy work that was required to manage the labor. He remembered trying to maneuver the horses while plowing the fields, “my father let me guide Pat and Mike, our two draft animals. When I called out, ‘giddy up’ the horses dragged me along the ground, the toes of my shoes raking the soil.” 271 They planted carrots and potatoes like the farmer that Taichi had worked with when he first entered the valley. While Isao had little interactions with Indian children in school, there were native people who lived nearby. One man, known as Old Tom, lived in a small cabin on their land they rented. Uncertain of how to interact with him and other Indians, Isao was afraid. But he witnessed his mother and father interacting with Old Tom, their Indian neighbor. This taught Isao that their families had more in common than they were different. “The older Yakamas still spoke the Yakima language,” Isao later recalled. “For the immigrants from Japan, Japanese was their main language. Since English was 270 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress,” accessed 1/20/2020. 271 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress,” accessed 1/20/2020. 147 not used by the older Indians or the Japanese families, I asked my mother how she communicated with Old Tom. ‘Oh, we used our hands’ was her answer.” 272 Life on the Reservation The new generation of Japanese born on the reservation benefited from patterns that the first settlers had put in place. The patterns that the first generation put in place have been examined primarily as a response to exclusions that coalesced into an ethnic identity. Historian Ronald Takaki has addressed these patterns as cultural responses and scholar Gail Nomura argues these were in response to appease white fears and critiques, thus building a public identity as the “local Japanese.” But the desires that Japanese had for permanency has scarcely been examined and we have missed what is on either side of the relief- deliberate acts of place-making and the settler colonial logics that were structuring the land and living. This section seeks to expand on this understanding through Taichi’s life and the life of second generation or Nisei such as Yasutaro Matsushita’s daughters Kara Kondo and Marjorie Matsushita, to demonstrate place making after the Alien Land Laws and the Immigration Act of 1924. This closer look will allow us to see the shaping of the Yakama Reservation as a racialized agricultural landscape shaped by the people and the logics set in motion. Japanese set the patterns in motion to meet needs and carve out spaces and make a claim for belonging. In the first two decades of the 20 th century the Japanese leaders had responded to the exclusion efforts by organizing a fund drive for the Red Cross, purchasing war bonds; raising money for the public schools; and encouraging the patronizing of white owned business. The 272 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress.” 148 leaders also structured groups to meet the various needs such as a Parent’s group to serve as liaison between parents and school administrators, organized a farmer’s group to assure entrance into the market; and set up businesses downtown Wapato, Toppenish, and Yakima. While it is true that these efforts were effective as direct responses to exclusion efforts, they also served to make place and establish their desires for the future. The work of carving out space served to expand the possibilities for their future and the future of their children which was a top priority for the Japanese community. They had been accused of not caring about the community at large so their efforts were both a public display of their commitment and served to benefit their children in the public schools. In addition to investing in the local public schools many families also sent their children to study in Japan. This was criticized and feared by the observing white community to be a tactic to indoctrinate Japanese children. However, parents and leaders saw this as fulfilling a desire for their children to have expanded opportunities while preparing for any form of exclusions that affect them. That is, if the Japanese were banished from the Yakima Valley or the US, children would be prepared to navigate the country of Japan both legally and culturally. Sending them to Japan and at times obtaining a Japanese passport offered insurance for any outcomes that may befall the next generation. Whether their future would play out in the US or in Japan, Japanese families planned for it. The leadership body offered language and cultural classes at the Japanese Association building. Families practiced their customs and spoke the Japanese language at home and even if children were not sent to Japan to study, they learned in their home just like other immigrant families. Formal language classes were started as a missionary project by Ms. Aya Okuda, a Japanese Methodist minister who was sent from Japan to the US to minister to Wapato Japanese. 149 She partnered with local white women who had begun teaching the Christian religion to Japanese children after school. The language classes built a bridge between the children and the older generation; offered students access to advance learning of their home language, and for Christian Japanese, gave them a way to teach religion. When Christian and Buddhist Japanese established their own buildings, the Japanese Association continued to offer the Japanese language classes and expanded on cultural classes for all children regardless of religious affiliation. The classes were an expression of the desires and the plans for their children’s futures in action. Kara Kondo, the daughter of Yasutaro Matsushita, had not been sent to Japan but her mother taught her to read and speak the Japanese language and she attended classes on the weekends at the Association building. The space in the Japanese Association building housed the desires and plans that families had for the Nisei in a rhythmic schedule of offerings that families could access. White critics of the Japanese community misjudged their schools as evidence of Japanese nationalism. While it’s true that Japanese Issei often dreamed about returning home, Kara Kondo hesitated in speculating on her parents’ wishes for themselves. Responding to a question about whether they desired to be back in Japan, she said “I don’t think they ever did. I think there’s that they had a great deal of loyalty to Japan. And, but I don’t think they had ever considered— perhaps early on they did—of making a fortune and returning.” But she firmly understood their desires for her and her siblings when she stated, “I felt that their future was in the United States, and our, the future of us was here, also.” 273 She went on to describe how her parents buffered their experiences in everyday life against racism and exclusions by limiting discussions in the home. She remembered fondly that their house was “always full of Isseis. Always, always talking. And they were, I think they were much more worldly in their attitudes than, that we were 273 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives, page 14. 150 led to believe.” Vibrant conversations amongst the men sometimes turned into debates, and she was encouraged to join in. “And sometimes we would argue from our American viewpoint,” she recalled, speaking of herself and her sisters. 274 Conversations revolved world politics, planning for the next season, and other readings her father and their neighbors were discussing but left out racial exclusions. Kondo speculated it may have been a way to protect the children from worry and from developing a negative view on the place and their future. The investment that the leadership made into the future for Japanese children had its wins, but nonetheless the children encountered limitations. Nisei attended the local public schools with their white peers and joined in the social clubs and sports teams. For example, the 1931 Wapato High School yearbook lists seven Japanese seniors, one Filipino senior, and 41 white seniors. The Valedictorian was Sono Kikuchi, who also was nicknamed “Sammy.” She was in the honor’s society, the glee club, the journalism team, and sang in the operetta. Her motto was, “tested and tried and not found wanting,” – a nod to a Biblical scripture on faithfulness. Amongst her white peers were two Kauppi children, the Finnish family they had been neighbors with at one time. 275 However the Matsushita children remembered that they had their social limits even though they were unspoken. “I think down deep we realized that there were limits. We didn’t try to get into DeMolay or whatever the other kinds of, strictly, the Rainbow Girls or some of the things that I don’t think we ever attempted.” 276 Because of this 274 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives, page 8. 275 The norm, to enter school to learn to read and write regardless of age (to some degree) but it was common for older immigrants to attend high school. Such was also the case with Sho Matsushita, Kara Kondo’s uncle who entered high school as an adult and graduated as an adult. Wapato Senior High Year Book, Ancestry.com. 276 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives, page 9. 151 Nisei made their own spaces of belonging. They pushed truck flatbeds together, strung up lights, and played music on the phonograph to dance their Friday nights away; they socialized with other Japanese children after school; and they had picnics together. Even when they visited white social spaces, such as the Donald Dance Hall, they stayed within their own groups. 277 The unspoken rules were clear enough and resulted in the boundaries of their ethnic identity negotiated as the boundaries of their social spaces. The Japanese Association later facilitated some of these activities for the Nisei beyond the language and cultural classes that they offered. Though the efforts leaders invested in the public arena resulted in gains for the Nisei, it was not enough for them to be fully integrated into American culture. Kondo later shared that her neighborhood life was experienced much differently than her school life. In school Kondo felt unspoken limitations around her white peers but it was in the summer times and afterschool that she experienced what she recalled was a “multicultural” neighborhood. She stated, “And the families that I remember more closely were Finnish families who lived in that area, whose parents could not speak English.” The Finnish family were as recent immigrants as her father was to the area. Like her own family where cultural practices and language other than English were spoken, she fondly remembered that their parents did not speak English but that she learned of their customs and their saunas “far before it became such a popular thing.” Another friend was a Yakama Native American girl who also lived nearby named Dorothy Saluskin, a relative of a Yakama chief. She also remembered a girl who was disabled but went everywhere they did on horseback. And because her family had set up a fruit stand “so that we would stay out of mischief in the summertime,” it brought people from all 277 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives pages 19-20. 152 over, including a Native American woman that mesmerized Kondo. She later asked a friend if he remembered “this beautiful Native American woman that I used to see driving by.” A rich, multicultural life was more organic in the rural neighborhood than was experienced in the school structure. 278 Both Kondo and her sister Marjorie described their mother as strong and gentle. They recalled her passion for “light” reading, compared to the dense and political reading that they recalled their father doing, and her desire to teach the family Japanese cultural practices such as traditional tea ceremony, stories, and reading in Japanese. They spoke the Japanese language at home and entertained their friends and neighbors building strong community connections within their geographical and communal limits. And Marjorie recalled her mother inspiring her to think creatively and to dream big. “I was raised with ideas,” she recalled, then recounted how her mother had sat the girls down on the porch and started a conversation by saying, “What if I…” then told them she desired to learn how to fly. Marjorie attributes her expansive thinking, loud voice, and adventurous spirit to her quiet and gentle mother with big dreams. 279 But that neighborhood experience was prior to the Alien Land Laws which directly impacted the Matsushita household. The disruption that came with the laws uprooted the family and Kondo’s multicultural experience, causing the family to move to another lease in their temporary housing structure, to sharecrop a lease with another Japanese family. The days of seeing her friends after school and working in the summer fruit stand changed with the impermanence of their living arrangements. They had developed relationships based on the space 278 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives, pages 8- 9. 279 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Marjorie Matsushita Interview, Densho Digital Archives, 8-11. 153 of living but with their only interactions structured by the school system, their relationships because more segregated and based on ethnicity and religious affiliation. The tent-house was placed on logs and moved by horse to the new location. “We followed the lease,” she recalled, until they were removed from the Yakima Valley in 1942. The settler colonial logics of ordering neighbor and labor are visible in the implications of the Alien Land Laws and their failure is observable in the relationships that Indians and Japanese built because of them. These laws aimed at restricting Japanese and other non-white immigrants from leasing land impacted the immigrant social and neighborly experience. The Matsushita women expressed this in the disruption and changes of having to be removed from their lease after 1924. Their relationship with local Indians willing to bypass the agency became more important for their survival. Because they were banned from renewing their lease through the Indian Agency, the Matsushita family became sharecroppers. The willingness of Indians to bypass the land laws and lease land to their Japanese neighbors further demonstrates the failure of settler colonialism because it shows Indian refusal of the laws and their desires to live outside of the settler colonial logic. Japanese expanded on their relationships with Native peoples and sought other ways to establish themselves a sign of their desire for permanency. Japanese Association Rhythms based on neighborly connection resonated to Prefectural Associations and the Japanese Associations which held broader aims and institutionalized networks throughout the West Coast. The Tacoma Japanese Association was established in 1891, and the Seattle organization formalized with 46 members in 1900. The North Yakima Japanese Association was established in 1906 in the city of North Yakima but by 1920 moved its location to Wapato which 154 had become the hub of a vibrant Japanese life. The Association purchased land in the city limits prior to the Alien Land Laws and built a center from which to organize and conduct business. Their efforts were mainly concerned with the cultural, social, and economic life of the Japanese immigrants. Thus, they hosted Japanese language classes, martial arts and dance classes, and other cultural learning opportunities for young and old. They also hosted entertainment events such as the “talkies” or silent movies narrated by Benshi-the movie man who set up the films and voiced over all the characters. 280 They served as a central location for itinerant merchants to sell their goods, foods, and medicines. In addition to this, they hosted religious events for both the Buddhist community and the Methodist community that grew in the 1920s. Although the association cared about helping the community “get along with their Indian neighbors and do business with the white business owners,” they also invested and cultivated a vibrant cultural life in the Valley. 281 The desire to build a vibrant social life was the reason that the Japanese Association had recruited Tokichi and Hatsue Fukuda to come and work with the children in the Valley. Tokichi and Hatsue Fukuda had been recruited from a Portland, Oregon school to teach cultural arts, martial arts, and language classes. Tokichi had also made a name for himself by training at least six other successful baseball teams. And while living on the reservation, he successfully trained the Wapato Nippons, a youth baseball team that became a source of pride and a symbol of integration for the Japanese and the white community. When Tokichi died unexpectedly in 1941 the Wapato High School ended sessions early to host his funeral, and later 280 Fujimoto, “Life Lessons at 80: A Memoir in Progress”; Ito and Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview. 281 Lon Inaba, interview with author, Wapato, Washington, on 2/28/2020. 155 that spring, a baseball tournament hosting teams from throughout the PNW played in his honor. The Japanese Association building held the dreams, plans, and work the Fukuda’s invested in their private sphere that resonated to their public influence in the community. Japanese Methodist Church It was 1925 when Aya Okuda, the Japanese missionary, widow, and single mother, was sent from Japan to evangelize the Japanese immigrant in the city of Wapato. She joined the efforts of white Christian women who had begun evangelizing to young children and families. Mabel Brown who was a local schoolteacher, Caroline Boyd, and Azaia Pete, taught Sunday School classes at the Japanese Association building. Along with religious studies, Okuda also taught Japanese language classes. As interest grew, Okuda began teaching parents and adults while the white women continued teaching children. As noted earlier, the Japanese Christian converts were not invited into white Christian churches but rather the group met at the Japanese Association building. When Okuda returned to Japan, the community continued to grow to the point that they asked the Methodist denomination headquarters in San Francisco for a permanent pastor overseer. Okuda returned to Wapato and she was the first pastor installed over the Methodist Japanese church. They purchased a site and the foundation of their church was poured in 1931. 282 The Methodist Japanese, though segregated from white Christians, created new opportunities for state-wide engagement through conferences and events. 283 Buddhist Community Church 282 Heuterman, 82-86. 283 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives. 156 The Japanese community had continuously practiced Buddhist traditions in their homes supported by itinerant Buddhist priests who visited sporadically from Spokane or Seattle to minister to the community. In 1928, the Buddhist community took notice of the Christian group that had grown among them when a famous businessman from Japan, Mr. Sato, visited the Wapato community. Speaking in front of 200 people Sato started on the topic of business but ended the talk by turning to religion. He invited his audience to turn from Buddhism to Christianity but exploded when only five people responded to his call. The rest of them, he preached, were like “ihi-koro,” pebbles on the road. At his words, 150 people stood in protest and left the room. The met later that night and organized the Buddhist church in Wapato. 284 By 1929 the first Buddhist permanent Reverend was sent from Japan to minister to the Wapato Buddhist community and in 1930 the foundation was poured for a new building. Before any religious buildings were built, all religious activities were held in the Japanese Association building. Once the religious groups split into separate buildings, the Japanese Language school continued separately and for all groups regardless of religious affiliation in the Association building. Bussei Kaikan The growing families and deep desires for the future placed the Japanese families in position to reshape the landscape of the small city of Wapato. They decided to build a community center, a space where their children would have space for entertainment, dances, gatherings, and learning. The building would be a joint venture, bringing the members of both religious affiliations together. They chose a US born Japanese who had begun designing 284 Buddhist church history and interview with Lon Inaba. 157 buildings under his own name, Kichio Allen Arai. Arai graduated from the University of Washington architectural school and earned an advanced degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1930. He designed the Bussei Kaikan in the Art Moderne style, but the design was only the start of the building. Community members from far and wide donated and pledged funds to bring the dream to a reality. It was Taichi Fujimoto who was invited to take up his craft once more and be in charge of construction on the building. 285 It had been almost ten years since Taichi had left his craft. He had worked hard to become a farmer, working from the ground up to feed his family and make place in the Valley. But taking on the construction of the building was sheer joy. Although the rhythms of the valley had shaped Taichi into a farmer, he was able to take up his skills once again and do what he loved. “My father was a carpenter, he was farming too,” recalled Isao, “but because of his skill he was asked to really take leadership.” 286 The construction was started in 1936 by first contracting for the foundation to be poured, then the building began. The building became an opportunity for the Japanese community to mark their place of belonging and change the landscape of the small city. The structure would be framed with the hopes for the future that the Japanese pioneers had been sowing in the Valley. 285 Tammy Ayer, “Wapato’s Buddhist Hall merges present and the past,” Yakima Herald, February 2, 2018. David A Rash, “Kichio Allen Arai,” in Shaping Seattle Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects, Second Edition, edited by Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, University of Washington Press, 2014, pages 284-289. 286 Fujimoto, Bounding Back. 158 Figure 26: The Bussei Kaikan, under construction. Circa 1938. 287 287 Bussei Kaikan under construction, circa 1938, Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 159 Conclusion: Crafting Place Hatsue Fukuda, the language and culture teacher of the Japanese community, felt the cold air around her as she worked quietly on the second floor of the community center, the Bussei Kaikan. It had been less than two months since the bombing on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and news had spread quickly in the small town that two servicemen from Wapato had died in the attack. Overnight the atmosphere in the town grew cold, just like it did in other towns across the West Coast, and neighbors grew suspicious of the Japanese. That afternoon, her mind was set on Tokichi, her beloved husband who had died unexpectedly the previous year. She was comforted to know that his ashes were next door at the Buddhist church on the altar near the Amida Buddha. She gazed out the window towards the church as she thought about him. 288 If it had been a clear spring day, Hatsue would have been able to see the image of the snowy horse cast by shadows on Mount Pahto, an enduring view in the area. But instead, it was a cold day in the desert on that Friday, January 23, 1942, there was still snow on the ground and the winter skies were gray. Hatsue looked towards the Japanese Association building where her living quarters and work studio were as she thought about her husband’s dedication and the heavy atmosphere that had befallen on the small town that she had come to call home. Abruptly, Hatsue’s daydream was jarred by her daughter’s gasp and the brightness of the fire engulfing the Japanese Association building came into view. She dropped everything and headed towards her home, running in the snow. “The building burned with a brilliant red against the snow,” she later recalled. “I ran to the school, stumbling in the snowy street. With tears in my eyes, I watched the building burn.” 289 For Hatsue, the grief of losing the structure was 288 Ito, 603-604, and Heuterman, 117. 289 Ito, 604. 160 compounded with the memories and desires she and her family had poured into it. The building was more than her place of work. It was also a place where she and her husband had made their home. The building held the dreams, plans, and work the Fukuda’s invested in their private sphere that resonated to their public influence in the community. As Tokichi and her friends looked through the rubble, it was clear that vandals had started the fire with oily rags thrown into the basement. The vandalism and threats to life and livelihood were not isolated events. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, local businessmen had immediately circulated a petition requesting that all Japanese be banned from doing business in the small town. A curfew had been set for Japanese in the city and the surrounding towns restricting them from public spaces after 6pm. 290 And even more detrimental, the bank accounts of the Japanese had been frozen. 291 On a social level, their white neighbors, even those who had been cordial to Japanese in the past, began to eye them with fear, anger, and suspicion. 292 But perhaps the most disruptive and threatening was the arrest of five prominent Japanese leaders in the Valley beginning on the same night of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Kameichi Ono, a leader in the community, was arrested first on the same day as the bombing. After the family had gone to bed Federal agents barged into the house without knocking. Ono’s daughter pretended to stay asleep. Afraid but awake, she overheard the agents rummaging through the family’s belongings before they arrested him. 293 In the following days four more Isseis were arrested: two business partners who managed export of produce, Kay Morinaga and Joe Kamihara, two religious 290 Ito, 603-604. 291 Heuterman, 113. 292 Alice Ito and Gail Nomura, Kara Kondo Interview, Densho Digital Archives. 293 Heuterman, 113. 161 leaders- the Buddhist priest Rev. Tessho Matsumoto, and the Methodist minister Rev. Yoshikazu Horikoshi, and the carpenter who was building the Bussei Kaikan, Taichi Fujimoto. These men and their lives represent the ways that Japanese settled and made place in the Valley, concurrently seen as a threat to the federal agents who had tapped their phones as early as November 1941. When the fire died down, there was a shell of a building left; only a third of the building remained. The young cherry tree the community had planted near the building when it was first erected, though it was damaged, survived. The Japanese community whispered rumors of what was to come for them, fears intensified after the arson attack on the Japanese Association building. Kara Kondo had been attending the University of Washington but returned home to be with her parents the Matsushita’s. Community support mobilized but only dimly. The Wapato Mayor made a public announcement through the newspaper that he was in support of the Japanese community because they were known as good neighbors, and some business owners came to their defense despite losing customers. Esther Boyd, the owner and operator of S&S Short’s Hardware lost life-long customers because of her support along with Dan McDonald, the farmer and friend of many Japanese families, who publicly spoke out against the animosity towards Japanese. Not knowing when things would change produced a sense of dislocation unlike what the community had experienced before. Following the lease at least meant that families moved in their tent-houses to the next location, with their stuff and their investments, the things they had called their own. They could take their pets and farm animals that sustained them. Even those dislocations caused by the Alien Land Laws with its stringent leasing rules meant to limit the participation of Japanese on the Reservation could not be compared with the uncertainty of 162 displacement and confinement that came with Executive Order 9066. The Japanese community began scrambling to figure out where they would leave belongings and how to sell their large items such as vehicles and farm equipment. Others buried materials such as religious and other writings that could be mistaken for propaganda. Tei Tomita, for example, burned several books of her own poetry. Years of her writing went up in flames, and she hoped it would protect her family. 294 The Buddhist church held precious items that meant much to the community such as the Amida Buddha and the ornate altar that had been created to frame it. Tokichi “Frank” Fukuda’s ashes were also held close to the Buddha and Hatsue wondered how to protect his remains when the Japanese Association went up in flames. While the community looked to protect their belongings, Hatsue sought out a place to store her husband’s ashes. The local mortician who was just across the street from the church refused to keep them safe, afraid of public repercussions, but James Bernard Gilmore, the owner of Gilmore Jewelers in Wapato, offered to embed the ashes into her watch. 295 Hatsue later said, “He painted the crystal with a metallic paint something like lead, to make it opaque, and removing the works, he put the ashes in the cavity. Both sides of the watch he inscribed inside with my husband’s secular name and his immortal Buddhist name. I carried this watch with me everywhere, for even if I was to die in some unknown place I wanted to be with him.” 296 For Hatsue, place and memory were stored in the watch she wore and took with her even after being relocated to the concentration camps in 294 Much of Tei’s work that survived only did so because it was published in Washington and Japan in poetry and ethnic publications. 295 Information on James Bernard Gilmore, date of birth 9/10/1884, Ancestry.com. 296 Ito, 603-604. 163 Portland, Oregon, then moved to Heart Mountain, and again to Minidoka, Idaho. And even as she was dislocated, she continued to teach Japanese art and language. 297 Figure 27: Fukuda and her watch. “Embroidery Class,” at Minidoka concentration camp, Idaho, circa 1943. From left to right: Mrs. Okita, Mrs. Torii, Mrs. Hatsue Fukuda (teacher), Mrs. Matsuda, Mrs. Hamada, and Mrs. Iwashita. Hatsue Fukuda wearing a watch, “I carried this watch with me everywhere.” 298 In May of 1942, the Japanese community were removed from Wapato by train. They watched as Mt. Pahto faded in the distance. They had filled their American friends’ attics with materials they couldn’t take with them, boxes carefully sealed and labeled. They left things in closets of friends and neighbors and in the Buddhist church for safe keeping. They left their pets and their farm animals and the work they had toiled with their hands and bodies. And, 297 Ito, 603-605, and information from War Relocation Records in Ancestry.com. 298 “Embroidery Class,” Wing Luke Asian Museum collection, ddr-densho-39-13, densho.org. 164 incomplete, they left the Bussei Kaikan. A building that held their desires for permanence and that simultaneously demonstrated their incomplete efforts. The Buddhist altar had been carefully dismantled and sealed up under the stage of the Kaikan, unbeknownst to others. During the war the Army used the site as a place of mending the spirits and meeting the needs of the service men who were serving in the war, the altar hiding under their feet. In front of the Buddhist church with its boarded-up windows bulging with the precious things that the community left behind, the young cherry tree that they had quietly been transplanted from the Japanese Association building dug its roots down deep into the soil of the reservation. The Japanese Issei and Nisei pushed back on the limitations that were imposed on them and while doing so defined the edges of who they were as a community. Part of this identity formation was to deliberately develop a public facing local identity. By developing adaptive strategies and politically mobilizing to address the anti-Japanese assault wielded against them, the community made efforts to fit into the American way of life and in doing so developed an ethnic identity. This chapter has argued that in this process, the Japanese community also aimed to make place and set down new rhythms that helped them make a claim to the agricultural space. The settler colonial logics that structured the land and living that aimed to dispossess Native Americans of their homelands through allotment then land leasing also aimed to bar non- white immigrants from settlement. The logics were manifested through personal and organized anti-Japanese racism such as the individual attacks of neighbors negotiating water and space, and organized attacks that led to state and federal policies. 165 Figure 28: The Bussei Kaikan, still incomplete but in use, 1940, Wapato, Washington. 299 299 Yakima Valley Museum, Special Collections. 166 Bibliography PRIMARY SOURCES Manuscripts and Collections Abraham Lincoln Papers. Library of Congress digital archives. The Sundquist Research Library. Yakima Valley Museum Special Collections. McWhorter, L.V. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation, Entangled Histories of Land and Labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20th century, is an examination of the impact of immigration and settlement on Indigenous people of the Yakama Reservation. I analyze photographs, family and epistolary archives, court documents, and newspapers to create a rich account of the interactions between settlers, immigrants- with a special focus on the Japanese and Mexican immigrant experience- and the Indigenous people of the Yakama Reservation in Central Washington State.

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Creator Hunter, Yesenia Navarrete (author)

Core Title Entangled histories of land and labor on the Yakama Reservation in the 20th century

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/22/2022

Defense Date 04/13/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag immigration,indigenous peoples,Japanese,movement,OAI-PMH Harvest,place-making,refusal,reservation,settler colonialism,settler logics,Yakama,Yakima

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Advisor Sanchez, George J. (committee chair), Gonzalez, Martha (committee member), Mancall, Peter C. (committee member), Molina, Natalia (committee member)

Creator Email yesihunter@gmail.com,yhunter@usc.edu

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