Indigenous Confluences

Voices from World War II

Holly Miowak Guise

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780295752532
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to advance colonial expansion in relation to the geographically and culturally diverse Indigenous communities affected. Offering important Alaska Native experiences of this history, Holly Miowak Guise draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War. The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in World War II Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to enact their sovereignty and restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control. Their subversive actions altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands. A multifaceted challenge to conventional histories, Alaska Native Resilience shares the experiences of Indigenous peoples from across Alaska to reveal long-overlooked demonstrations of Native opposition to colonialism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Forms of Separation, Exclusion, and Segregation in the Alaska Territory during World War II
• Maps
• An Alaskan Introduction: Regaining Indigenous Equilibrium as Wartime Resistance
• One: Unangax̂ Relocation: Forced Removal and Forced Labor
• Two: Survivance Alliance: Tribal Mutual Aid and Sovereignty
• Three: War on Unangax̂ Soil: The Battle of Attu, Native Nations, and the US Military
• Four: The Alaska Territorial Guard: The Indigenized Guerrilla Platoon
• Five: Racing and Erasing Natives: Frozen Jim Crow and Assimilation
• Six: War and Sexual Violence: Gender, Segregation, and Imperialism in Alaska
• Epilogue: People, Land, and Sovereignty
• Appendix: Timeline of Oral History Research Travels
• Glossary: Because Terms Matter
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Series List