From the Archive / Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest / Brian D. Haley
About 2,400 feet above the desert floor in the Santa Catalina Mountains northeast of Tucson, Arizona, standing among oaks, piñons, and junipers charred by a devastating 2003 forest fire, are a few remnants of an old federal prison facility. The location is now named the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site in honor of the brave Japanese American who contested and eventually overturned his convictions for resisting Japanese curfew and relocation during the anti-Japanese hysteria that ensued after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The former Tucson Federal Prison Camp had been created in 1939 as a low security prison where inmates served their sentences in hard labor building the Catalina Highway that snakes its way through the rugged Santa Catalina Mountains of the Coronado National Forest. As war began, the prison housed conscientious objectors, draft resisters, Japanese American relocation resisters, unauthorized Mexican immigrants, and others. Among those imprisoned in the camp between 1941 and 1949 were a small number of Hopi Indians from northern Arizona who had been convicted of draft evasion when their religious objections to military service were rejected by the courts. The Hopi internees included two formally educated men, Chester Mote and Thomas Banyacya (then known as Thomas Jenkins), who would later become friends with Ammon Hennacy, a veteran conscientious objector of both world wars and a passionate advocate for pacifism and what he called “Christian anarchism.” Mote would sustain a correspondence with Hennacy for two years before. they met, as he—and subsequently Banyacya—gave an eager Hennacy access into Hopi politics for a half-dozen years as a partisan provocateur. From this privileged vantage point, Hennacy created a new politicized image of Hopi culture for the consumption of an emerging American counterculture. […]
