Tulelake camp

The Tulelake camp was a civilian conservation center and segregation facility located in Siskiyou County, five miles south of Tulelake, California. The camp was established by the US government in 1935 to accommodate vocational trainees. The camp was established initially to house enrollees as part of the expansion of available land for the Klamath Reclamation Project. During World War II the camp was used for sheltering Japanese American strikebreakers, imprisoning Japanese American dissidents, and housing Italian and German prisoners of war. After the war, on 25 April 1946, the camp was transferred from the Army to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which managed it prior to the establishment of the segregation camp. The four remaining buildings are currently part of a restoration project that aims to return its original look.

History
The Tulelake camp was built in 1933 as a public work relief program, part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The camp was one of several constructed for the Civilian Conservation Corps that provided six months to two years employment and vocational training for unemployed, unmarried men from relief families, ages 17–23. The 23-building camp included a duck hospital, an administrative headquarters office, the supervisors' residences, and a lookout cabin on the bluff behind the Refuge Visitor Center. Most of the buildings were constructed by the Enrollees themselves. Mexican-American stonemasons constructed over 300 feet of rock wall around the Refuge Headquarters.

The enrollees were paid $30 a month, $25 of which was sent home or put into a savings account. It provided unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state and local governments, building water control structures of timber and concrete. The CCC camp in southern Oregon dug irrigation ditches, and overall increased the Clear Lake reservoir’s capacity by about 60,000 acre‐feet. Shortly after the initial war efforts by the country, the majority of enrollees left the camp, which was subsequently closed in 1942.

Camp Tulelake
The CCC Tulelake camp neighbored the Tule Lake War Relocation Center. In March 1943, over 100 men from the Tule Lake Relocation Center (Internment Camp) were arrested and housed at renamed Camp Tulelake after they protested their unjust incarceration by refusing to answer, or answering "no—no," to the War Relocation Authority’s two clumsily worded questions on the loyalty questionnaire. While imprisoned at the maximum-securitycamp, inmates completed around $2,500 in repairs to the abandoned buildings, including installing new stove pipes, repairing the sewer and electrical systems. After several months, they were either released back to the Tule Lake Segregation Center or transferred to other facilities run by the Justice Department and the U.S. Army.

“Of all the wartime incarceration sites, Tule Lake tells the most extreme story of the government’s abuse of power against people who dared to speak out against the injustice of their incarceration,” said Barbara Takei, whose mother was incarcerated at Camp Tulelake during WWII.

Camp Tulelake also served as shelter for 243 Japanese American inmates brought in from other concentration camps to help the WRA undermine the striking Tule Lake prisoners. The strikebreakers were brought in to harvest the ripening crops and paid significantly higher wages than what Tule Lake inmates could earn. For their safety, they were housed at Camp Tulelake.

Since 1994 the Tule Lake Committee has sponsored the annual Tule Lake Pilgrimage, advocating for the preservation of the Tule Lake site, both Camp Tulelake and the Tule Lake War Segregation Center.

Frank Tanabe
A notable internee was Frank Tanabe, a Japanese American who volunteered to serve in a mostly Japanese American military unit, interrogating Japanese prisoners in India and China. When asked why he served in the same army that interned him, Tanabe replied, "I wanted to do my part to prove that I was not an enemy alien, or that none of us were — that we were true Americans. And if we ever got the chance, we would do our best to serve our country. And we did." During the 2012 Presidential race, Tanabe who was then 93 and on his deathbed, gained wide publicity for having his daughter fill out his last ballot. He received mostly positive reaction for his patriotism. Tanabe passed away on October 24, 2012. His family declined to announce which candidate he voted for.

Italian & German POWs
With so many local farmers participating in World War II, the Tulelake Growers Association petitioned the US Government to bring enough hands to help with the harvest. The federal government replied by sending 150 Italian Prisoners of War in May 1944. They converted the camp to accommodate additional German prisoners that arrived from Camp White (near Medford, Oregon) the following month. They set up fences, barbed wire, latrines, water lines, guard towers, and search lights around the camp.

At its peak in October 1944, the camp housed 800 German POWs who helped plant, tend, and harvest onion and potato crops. The POW’s lived and worked in the Tule Lake area until the camp closed in 1946. Even though some of the POWs applied for the lottery of local homesteads, none were drawn in.

Proposed airport fencing
In 2012 Modoc County officials applied for a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fund a new 8 ft tall and 3 mi long fence around the nearby Tulelake Municipal Airport, to keep animals off the runway. Groups concerned with the historical integrity of the former World War II Japanese American incarceration center have organized support to prevent the planned fence, which would surround the site of most of the prison's barracks — nearly 46 complete "blocks" and portions of several others — impeding visitors and desecrating the physical and spiritual integrity of the camp. The Stop the Fence at Tulelake Airport organization has explained, "A fence will prevent all Americans from experiencing the dimension and magnitude of the concentration camp where people experienced mass exclusion and racial hatred."

Being fenced out would especially impact former internees and their descendents, who make pilgrimages to the former incarceration site and their specific assigned barracks. A part of the camp pilgrimage experience is the ability to see and feel what former internees did, within the massive camp on the expansive plain. " “They want to traverse the site to experience the dimension and magnitude of the place, to gain a sense of the distances family members walked in their daily routine to eat meals, attend school, to do laundry and use the latrines. They want to summon up the ghosts of the place, to revive long-suppressed memories and to mourn personal and collective loss.”

One former internee held at the concentration camp as a child, the actor George Takei, has been active to gain support of the petition to stop the fence. Takei has said, “We must not permit this history to be erased and minimized by destroying the integrity of the site or making it inaccessible to future generations.”