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Objector Interview: Ed Nakawatase, A Story of Resistance
-Mario Hardy, Third World Outreach Coordinator
CCCO staff member Mario Hardy sat down recently with Ed Nakawatase, staff person with the American Indian program at American Friends Service Committee and a member of the advisory committee to CCCO's Third World Outreach Program in Communities of Color. Ed talked about his story of resistance.
Tell me a little about your background. Is it true you grew up in an internment camp?
I was born in Poston, AZ in 1943. Poston was one of ten internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry, which were set up shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the American entry to WWII. It was set up for the "evacuation and removal, "in the language of the War Department, of people of Japanese ancestry - from the West Coast of the United States, particularly the major cities, and all other areas within a certain distance from the Pacific Ocean. Essentially the Japanese populations of Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were removed, put into what were called assembly centers, and then later internment camps - ranged geographically from the Southeastern part of California, near Death Valley, to Aurora and Jerome in Arkansas.
The camps were established because the U.S. government claimed that the Japanese population, even citizens, posed a particular security threat. The decision and the action were clearly racist: no people of German or Italian ancestries were removed from their homes. It was a defining experience for the Japanese-American community.
Ironically, my parents actually married in camp. I'm not sure I would exist except for the evacuation and internment.
Often in the case of people of color we become politically, or socially, "aware" at an early age because of the conditions in which we live, dealings with racism, etc. How and when did you first become politically active?
Sometime in the 1950s. I grew up in a community called Seabrook in Southern New Jersey, a community with a significant Japanese-American population. It was a very good place to grow up. It was safe, it was rural, and it had a sense of common culture and community. That's not to say that it was well-to-do. It was essentially a working class community: most people, like my parents or my friends' parents, worked for Seabrook Farms, a frozen food packing company. In our community I don't feel there was a sense of being downtrodden or oppressed in any overt form; we felt some kinship, obviously, but there was no discussion that I can ever recall about the internment: What happened? Why did it happen?
Overall I learned not to rely on patriotism. I can remember from my parents a sort of coolness if I was ever "gung-ho" about what the country was doing, and not doing, when the Cold War was still very much a major factor. People were worried about nuclear war, and were worried about the Russians, saving civilization, standing up to them, and defeating them. My parents seemed, at that time, what I felt was unenthusiastic. My first set of memories, I remember reading in the papers about Joe McCarthy, and recall seeing on television the conflicts that took place around the first school desegregation orders in Little Rock in 1957, and the communities in the South, and the treatment of young blacks who tried to be officially enrolled and were met with enormous hostility.
We had enormous sympathy and support for them, but there was no "light on the road to Damascus", no conversion. I couldn't tell you that the community I was raised in had this tremendous outpouring of solidarity with the struggle against racial segregation, because at that point we didn't. But I think we did have racial consciousness. I've said before in another context that the feeling I had and others around me had was the native Whites seemed to be terribly overrated. I mean they weren't the smartest kids in our class, they weren't the best athletes, a lot of the "achievers" were Japanese or the children of European refugees.
How did you first come into contact with CCCO?
In 1963 I left college and went to drop myself on the doorstep of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). From the Fall of 1963 through the end of 1964 I worked with SNCC in Atlanta during one of the most exciting years in recent memory in historical terms. It was certainly important in terms of the Civil Rights movement because that was the year of the March on Washington, which reflected lots of grassroots organization, and agitation, and activity. It also represented the push that resulted in the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which essentially ended legal racial segregation. It was the year of the Freedom Summer, and I think it probably put the Civil Rights Movement at the center of public attention in this country. It gave the issue of racial discrimination, and segregation a visibility and an importance, and a kind of urgency that one could say has kind of been receding ever since.
I was given a draft notice in 1965. I sought draft counseling and I got it from CCCO. Particularly, Arlo Tatum guided me through the various particularities of the Selective Service Act. I did apply formally as a conscientious objector, and was rejected. I wasn't a Friend (Quaker), I wasn't even sure what I was in religious terms, but I remember that Arlo was very helpful, guiding me through the whole process at a time when the war was beginning to escalate.
The upshot of it all: I was planning on going to the induction center and refusing induction in Newark, NJ in 1966. That encounter never happened. They told me there had been a gap of about 3 years since my last physical and instructed me to take it again, and I failed it because of my vision, after all that. I had, however, come prepared to go to jail.
What was it in your personal system of beliefs that made you decide that you were a conscientious objector?
First of all, there was clearly the feeling that this particular war was an outrage. That it was an extension, or an expansion of U.S. power, an expression of it. As we learned more about it, it seemed very clearly an interference by the United States, and taking one side in a civil war.
I had once been like most Americans, a Cold Warrior, very much on the side of God, and justice, and truth. But coming out of the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of those notions start to ring pretty hollow. We had people here in our own country who couldn't vote, who were, at best second-class citizens - more like third, or fourth-class citizens in terms of social mobility, political and social opportunities.
So this view of the United States, as a democratic country under assault from a totalitarian regime, began to come unraveled. The expenditure of money and treasure, and human resources seemed incredibly wasteful, I mean, we had a lot to do here. I think that was the stupidity of the case of Vietnam, and of the U.S. role internationally. Democracy had yet to be won here, particularly and especially in terms of people of color.
What was the reaction of people within your community to your being a conscientious objector?
I don't remember any, to tell you the truth. Maybe they figured I was just crazy anyway, so they cut me a little slack on the point. I don't recall anyone coming up to me and spitting in my face or calling me a coward. Of course I came out of a community that was interned during the Second World War, in the midst of a popular war, "the war where we fought fascism." So there was an inherent skepticism.
However, there was a sizable sub-culture within the Japanese-American community who'd volunteered for World War II. One of the most famous Army groups was the 442nd regimental combat team, which was an all Japanese unit - which may be one of, if not the most decorated unit in WWII. One of the motivations of the unit was to prove themselves to a United States that had, in effect, rejected them.
Even so, I don't recall anybody directly expressing anything negative towards me.
Could you talk a little bit about the work that you do with the Native American program at AFSC?
Since the mid 1970s I've been on the staff of the Community Relations Division of the American Friends Service Community working with the organization's American Indian Program. That realm of program deals in many ways with the aftermath of the European encounter with Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere. There are different things related to the programs, and different focuses of the programs, but I think that you can argue, and I would, that all of them deal with some direct manifestation of the European encounter. That is, the loss of land, the diminution of sovereignty, the social dislocation that resulted, the incursions, or perversions made on the culture, and the subsequent violation of indigenous rights, aboriginal rights, and treaty rights.
What is your view of the historical relationship between the United States military and Native American people?
One way to think about it, is that historically, the U.S. military were instruments of a purpose, they were the tools, they did the dirty work. They secured the lands, they subdued resistance, and they maintained a very one-sided peace. I don't think of them as the central force. There, you could have a great deal of analysis, and discussion about the imperatives of Western development, European development, manifest destiny, expansionism, the needs of capitalism, etc.
There were in many cases, a great deal of contradictions, as with the Japanese-American combat team that performed with great bravery, at enormous risk, and with some benefits afterwards in terms of a lessening hostility. There are contradictions in terms of the struggle of American Indians; for example, there were units of black soldiers fighting against them on the plains.
We can see the way that the military has served a purpose, and a very negative one - and that within it one cannot deny the bravery, the camaraderie, and the sense of solidarity. There need to be non-violent alternatives. There need to be other ways to create human solidarity. Social struggles have been a possibility in that direction: the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement was like that, the women's movement, and other struggles.
In many historical accounts over the last 30-35 years, particularly on the left, Native Americans are seen solely as helpless victims. Could you talk a little bit about their contributions to the anti-war movement, and the progressive movement as a whole?
On one hand, you have the issue of basic political challenge. As long as Indians are around they challenge basic fundamentals, much in the same way that African Americans do. I think to look at what happened to American Indians, and what they did, and not to just see them as subjects but also as actors in history, is to get a much more skeptical view of the country and to rethink the assumptions about what the society of this country is. I don't mean wholly in negative terms, but there is an enormous basic, and painful truth about the formation of the United States, and its predecessors, the British Colonies, as well as the Spanish colonization that belies the rosier, more linear notions of development. That is an important contribution in and of itself.
The American culture has been, by its nature, very optimistic. There has been this very unchallenged belief in growth, the idea that tomorrow always brings another day, a bigger day, a brighter day, etc. The historical experience of the American Indian says, No, this is not so. You can be wiped out, that your culture is under assault, you're on the edge of danger all the time. That they have survived, I think, is an important fact. They've survived despite the worst intentions of this society, and despite the fact that they've generally been seen as an obstacle by the society as a whole.
I think, too, that Indian cultures have raised the fundamental challenges about where this culture is going. The experience of most folks in this culture is that we conquer Nature, that development is something that we do, that we can own land, and if we could own air, we would buy and sell that too. Native cultures challenge those assumptions, saying that you have to live in some degree of harmony with Nature, and that you can't buy and sell land, the Earth. These may often sound like New Age philosophies, but they're also true.
One thing that happens quite often, particularly in communities of color, and low-income communities, is that the military sells itself not as an institution of war, but as a post-high school training program, a financial aid institution, and a job training program.
What would you say to young people who are confronted with the military's recruiting sales pitch?
Be skeptical. Treat it like you would a pack of cigarettes: check the warning labels. Ultimately, the military machine is a killing machine. They might teach you how to operate computers, they might teach you how to use radar, how to fly a plane, how to drive a tank, though I don't know why you'd be driving a tank in a neighborhood. You can do all of those things, I wouldn't deny it. But the fundamental part of the military machine is to go to war.
I don't think one would have to be a pacifist to come to that point of view. That means a willingness and a desire, at least on the part of some, to do so. My experience is that, my consciousness was formed by seeing what an unjust war was close up. I've never been able to shake that off, and I hope I never will. |