On page 209 of Brandon Shimoda’s The Afterlife is Letting Go (City Lights, 2024) he quotes Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp (Coffee House Press, 1992):
“(And, yes, we had major camps on other reservations; so you might say that it makes sense that the chief camps administrator went on to become chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he ‘re-deployed’ his policy of ‘relocation.’ Which included, yes, ‘termination.’ Which reminds me—down the ridge, in Europe, our relatives had base camps in Italy, France, Germany, and some of them liberated a camp called Dachau.)”
It’s abhorrent that some soldiers or civilians parlayed one job at one concentration camp into enough experience to build the next phase of a career on, along with a pension, high quality medical care, and housing before they went on to play a pivotal role in another agency denying basic services, demeaning and dehumanizing one population and then another.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 