Opinion | Concentration camps are not just part of our past, but our present and future

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Every time I drive to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, I go past the site of a former concentration camp. In America, this isn’t unusual.

Just about wherever you go in this country — if you pay attention to history — you can find a spot where the U.S. government decided to incarcerate a group of people without any kind of trial or judicial process based on that group’s identity. Even if conservatives don’t want to hear it and are actively trying to erase those parts of our history from our classrooms, textbooks and public parks, concentration camps are as American as apple pie.

I’ve been thinking about this history a lot while watching the federal government embark on a new plan to build concentration camps across America, all funded by your tax dollars. The Trump administration is planning to spend $45 billion building and expanding a string of detention camps for immigrants, the vast majority of whom have no criminal history. Republicans can give the new camps cutesy, alliterative names like “Alligator Alcatraz” or “Speedway Slammer,” but that only intensifies the obscenity of the current project.

Someday, I hope, we’re going to have a reckoning over the horrors of this moment, but I don’t think we can do it without a clearer understanding of how this fits into U.S. history. There’s a tendency to say, “This isn’t who we are,” and I get the impulse, but history is never that simple.

In November 1862, around 1,600 Dakota people — mostly women, children and the elderly — were forcibly brought to a prison camp at Fort Snelling. Over the following winter, hundreds died due to disease and deprivation. In the following spring, the army enacted an explicit act of ethnic cleansing — authorized by Congress — and took the survivors from Minnesota and placed them at the new, isolated and desolate Crow Creek reservation in what is today South Dakota.

Concentration camps are an American tradition. They aren’t uniquely American, but rather stretch across the history of the modern world whenever and wherever states, following the definition of historian Andrea Pitzer, detain civilians without trial based on group identity. The concentration camps during the Holocaust, which is what most people associate with the phrase, were a particularly horrific example — and the mechanized death camps were specific to the Nazi regime’s plan.

But ethnic cleansing and mass death aren’t unusual in the long history of these institutions, as the history of Minnesota shows. There are also the German internment camps from World War I and the Japanese internment camps during World War II, which, like today’s immigrant concentration camps, fit Pitzer’s definition. Identity leads to extrajudicial incarceration. Only bad things follow.

Kim TallBear, professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate (a Dakota tribe), grew up in St. Paul and just recently returned to Minnesota. When we met earlier this month, she told me that the most important aspect of recognizing this history is not so those of us descended from settlers or who have otherwise benefited from the legacy of colonialism feel shame, but rather “to recognize that these tactics, [a division into] savage vs. civilized, continues to inhabit our society. At any moment, these sentiments are still there and this way of thinking emerges.”

This way of thinking has re-emerged and taken power right now. We’re experiencing the consequences.

The federal government is currently leading the way in trying to erase history. For example, by seeking to purge books and signs from Minnesota’s national parks that are “negative about past or living Americans.” This isn’t a surprise for Minnesotans, where Republican lawmakers have spent years trying to rewrite history to make themselves feel better. I grew up in the American South and know something about states unwilling to confront the worst parts of their history. But historical facts have a way of sticking around.

I hope that in the not too distant future, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will react to this moment with horror, rather than denial, and want to know more. They’ll want to know what you were doing. What will you tell them?