“I Class Myself”: Racial Classification and Alaska Native Indigeneity

Hana Maruyama (Assistant Professor, History, UConn)

with a response by Grégory Pierrot (English, UConn)

Wednesday November 13, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Paul Ozawa (Tlingit) had no Japanese ancestry to speak of—but he did have a Japanese surname. Without a birth certificate, Paul Ozawa could not prove that he was not Japanese, though it was common knowledge in his family and community that he had been adopted as an infant by Henry Ozawa, Sr. to protect his mother’s reputation. Moreover, Ozawa had not seen his adoptive father since age 5, when Paul’s mother had died from tuberculosis. Ozawa Sr. abandoned his three sons shortly thereafter. The three brothers had grown up in orphanages and boarding schools designed to forcibly assimilate Alaska Native children. Nonetheless, less than 24 hours before the ship transporting Japanese Americans from Alaska to Seattle was set to depart, the Alaska Defense Command informed Paul Ozawa that he needed to be onboard. In this talk, I analyze state-based processes of racial classification for Alaska Native prisoners in Japanese American World War 2 incarceration to argue that these served as a mode of what I term “archival elimination,” or the elimination of Indigenous identities, sovereignty, and presence in archives. I discuss how our over-reliance on settler archives undermines Indigenous identities and knowledge. Finally, I turn to a Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study interview with Ozawa and his letters to show how Ozawa took up racial logics to make his Tlingit identity legible to settler administrators.

Hana Maruyama is an assistant professor in history and social and critical inquiry at the University of Connecticut. Her current manuscript discusses how the federal government exploited Japanese Americans’ World War II incarceration to dispossess American Indians and Alaska Natives and advance U.S. settler colonialism. She is co-curating an exhibition on UConn ceramicist Minnie Negoro that launches at the Benton Art Museum in January 2025. Maruyama also directs the Fudeko Project, a digital journaling program for Japanese American former incarcerees. While completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota (UMN), she co-created/produced the Densho podcast Campu. She formerly worked for the UMN Immigration History Research Center, American Public Media’s Order 9066, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA, 2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books, 2021). He is co-editor with Marlene L. Daut and Marion Rohrleitner of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA, 2021), and co-author with Paul Youngquist of a scholarly edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (Duke 2013). He is currently working on a French-language monograph tentatively titled “Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power” that will explore how American writers imagined imminent African American revolution through fiction during the Black Power era.

Access note

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