On a grassy stretch of what was once the wide-open prairie sits the United Tribes Technical College (UTTC), a 230-acre site in Bismarck, North Dakota. A short distance from what was once Fort Lincoln, Apple Creek turns to meet the Missouri River. In 1863 this creek was crossed by peaceful Dakota and Lakota tribes looking for safe ground while being pursued by US troops. A school run by five tribal nations has been open on the site since 1969, one of three dozen tribal colleges and universities in the nation. Eighty-seven buildings of what had been Fort Lincoln were ceded to these Indigenous leaders, along with 106 acres of land. Its five-decade history means that UTTC has outlasted all previous iterations of how Fort Lincoln was purposed and repurposed by the government.

Erected at the turn of the 20th century, Fort Lincoln originally consisted of 30 buildings, all brick structures, used to mobilize troops heading to the Philippines and to border disputes with Mexico. After these conflicts it was used to house and prepare soldiers for World War I. In the late 1920s and early ’30s the fort served as regional headquarters for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a Depression-era work program.

However, the site pivoted from military preparation to incarceration when, from 1941 to 1946, portions of the fort were cordoned off for human confinement. A 10-foot-high cyclone fence was erected, barbed wire was installed atop the fence, and the area was fortified with guard towers, transforming the fort into an internment camp. During these years upwards of 4,000 men were held at Fort Lincoln after being detained by the FBI. Both Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese ancestry were held at the fort, along with German and Italian POWs.

By 1948, the property shifted again, becoming a headquarters for the US Army Corps of Engineers during the construction of North Dakota’s Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea (a move that flooded thousands of acres of tribal lands along the Missouri River). By the late 1960s, negotiations were in process to cede the fort and surrounding land to tribal leaders.

Today the buildings represent something very different from what they once did—the cooperative efforts of a collective of five tribal nations who are intent on preserving the legacy of Indigenous peoples, but who are also committed to pointing out the commonalities between what occurred here in the 1940s and their own painful histories.

As part of its commitment to the education and advancement of Native and non-Native students, UTTC strives to improve understanding about the ill-treatment of many groups of people in America and to help bring about healing for those who suffered unjustly. The Fort Lincoln space, like most any other place in what is now the United States, could memorialize the removal of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands. But the college decided to shine a light on the history of the fort as an internment camp, mainly for Americans of Japanese descent.

The Acknowledgment of Injustices

When MASS Design Group was approached to commemorate those who were interned at Fort Lincoln, their first step was to look at the history of how the prisoners ended up here. Just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the first 400 Japanese, mostly noncitizens suspected of espionage, were interned and placed into wooden barracks. In 1942 Roosevelt would mandate mass incarceration for Japanese Americans—first-generation immigrants, who were denied citizenship by law; Japanese immigrants, who were also denied citizenship; and second-generation Japanese Americans, who were American citizens by birth. The process of removal began in late February 1942. Japanese Americans throughout the West Coast were given little notice, often only a week, before having to report to temporary detention centers like Fort Lincoln.

The government’s War Relocation Authority forced the Japanese Americans to answer a loyalty questionnaire. The questions were disguised as steps toward release, but instead sowed division and distrust. Two questions asked if the respondent was loyal to the United States, forcing an impossible and dehumanizing choice upon Japanese Americans—obediently declare a loyalty that should never have been questioned, or protest the violation of your rights by answering “no-no” and be deemed disloyal. Many of the men at Fort Lincoln were so-called “no-no boys,” having expressed their disgust with relocation by their negative answers.

The displacement and other life-altering circumstances brought about by wartime incarceration would affect the Japanese American community for generations to come.

Ganbatte is one of the most common words in the Japanese language. Most easily translated as “do your best,” it is also a call to triumph over adversity. During internment, ganbatte came to mean resisting injustice. The “no-no boys” represent the spirit of ganbatte. This spirit of resistance can also be seen in the ongoing fight of Native American communities for sovereignty, civil rights, and cultural agency. This commonality was strengthened when the tribal leaders took on the challenge of uplifting a story of injustices done to another minority.

For the memorial at UTTC, first the goal is to convey the story of the Japanese American experience at Fort Lincoln and to carry forward the spirit of ganbatte across generations and cultures. More broadly, however, there is a bigger opportunity to catalyze a vast reconciliation process around intersectional and sustained systems of oppression in America. Though this was a center for injustices unrelated to the tribes, their acknowledgment and ownership of this narrative is impactful. “This is important work,” says Dr. Leander McDonald, president of UTTC, “to recognize what happened not only to our Japanese American relatives but also to ourselves. This memorial will show that we’re still here, that we’ve survived, and that now we need to move ahead.”

The system of oppression at play links the Japanese and the tribal nations, and with this memorial they can confront the ugly legacy of this place through shared empathy, empowering the space through memory. At its best, this public acknowledgment will link these histories, while memorializing the injustices both communities experienced.

Fort Robinson, like many sites in the United States, frames its history within the context of western expansion; it’s a milestone in a narrative of progress and of the discovery of new land to which European settlers could stake a claim. From both design and storytelling perspectives we are forced to reckon with this settler-colonial historical context while attempting to explore the experience of Indigenous peoples affected by that encroachment. By unpacking and reclaiming the narrative of westward expansion, Indigenous voices can regain control of a history that has, by and large, been framed by the white “owners” of that narrative. To reframe it requires that we envision a borderless/stateless account of place, while also taking into account the boundaries created by the westward expansion of white settlement, and the effect of those boundaries and settlements on the lives and narratives of those who lived there before there were boundaries.

The first transcontinental railroad was built between 1863 and 1869. Its construction prompted ever-greater numbers of people to settle in the West and to export the region’s natural resources to the booming cities in California, the Midwest, and the East. At sites like Fort Robinson, this story of railroad expansion is too often told in terms of “progress,” with the brutality left out. And Fort Robinson has left a brutal legacy.

As the Union Pacific cut its way westward across the Platte Valley in 1865, its workers grew fearful of what they called "the Indian menace." Certainly, the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho maintained a presence on what had once been their ancestral homelands and prime hunting land. While chiefs ordered their warriors to stay away from the railways, they were not always obeyed, and the railroad received its share of harassment. This led to an increased sense of the railroad’s vulnerability and fears that it could be compromised, which spawned a greater military presence at strategic posts throughout the plains.

By the 1860s, Native Americans had signed away the rights to much of their land in treaties with the federal government. By the time of railway construction, decades of mass immigration by settlers had already destroyed large swaths of the countryside, forcing buffalo herds to migrate elsewhere and forcing the tribes that remained to disperse in search of food. But the railroad was probably the single biggest contributor to the loss of the bison, which was particularly traumatic to the Plains tribes, who depended on it for everything from meat for food to skins and fur for clothing, and more.

Tribes increasingly came into conflict with the railroad as they attempted to defend their diminishing resources. Tribes of the Plains found themselves at cultural odds with the whites building the railroad and settlers claiming ownership of land that had previously never been owned. In response, Native Americans sabotaged the railroad and attacked white settlements supported by the line, in an attempt to reclaim the way of life that was being taken from them. If they were not taking aim at the railroad tracks and machinery, they were attacking the workers and absconding with their livestock. Ultimately the tribes of the Plains were unsuccessful in preventing the loss of their territory and hunting resources. Their struggle serves as a poignant example of how the transcontinental railroad could simultaneously destroy one way of life and usher in another.

Morning Star, a prominent Cheyenne leader, fought beside Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the war for the Black Hills, made famous in the white world as Custer’s Last Stand. He and his band were forced to surrender to the US Army in 1877 and were relocated to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The Cheyenne repeatedly petitioned to be able to return to their sacred Black Hills homeland, but were refused, so Morning Star helped to lead an escape. Three hundred Cheyenne fled north, then split into two bands. The band led by Morning Star, which would become the Northern Cheyenne, was attacked by an army patrol in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and brought to Fort Robinson, where they lived as virtual prisoners until the Interior Department ruled that they had to be returned to the Indian Territory.

This provoked a second escape. Soldiers pursued; the Cheyenne set up a defensive perimeter and in the battle that followed, many of them were killed and the rest imprisoned. Only eight Cheyenne, including Morning Star, managed to escape to the Pine Ridge reservation in the Black Hills.