Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 137

Since the nineteenth century, the abundance and open space of the American West represented freedom to immigrants and their descendants even as ecological constraints held them hostage to natural forces. In this narrative, new arrivals chose to resettle places that demanded an accommodation with the non-human world. During the Second World War, the United States government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast and incarcerated them at internment camps located in the arid Western interior. As Connie Y. Chiang demonstrates in Nature behind barbed wire, the environmental realities of their relocation to, confinement at, and hardships living in the camps mediated their unjust treatment during the war. But Chiang also makes clear that in many ways Japanese Americans leveraged those material realities of the non-human world to enhance their living conditions and negotiate the terms of their incarceration. In this way, Chiang uses the environment as a lens through which to investigate the social relations of freedom, injustice, and agency that characterized the history of Japanese American internment camps during the war.

Barbed wire fences defined the physical space of the camps, and therefore the practical edges of Japanese American freedom during the war. By emphasizing the relationship between detainees and their environment, however, Chiang also illustrates how the fences serve as a wonderfully evocative metaphor for both the denial and reclamation of freedom. Chiang makes clear that fences created a framework for both for detainees and historians to understand how farm fields and gardens, a windswept and arid climate, and the enormity of the surrounding landscape shaped the wartime experience of Japanese Americans. Despite the importance of the fences as a literal and imaginative framing device, Chiang demonstrates that detainees consistently engaged with the environment outside camp settings through farm work, hiking, swimming, and fishing in ways that transgressed the fences. By exploring how Japanese Americans interacted with their environment during the war, Chiang demonstrates that they negotiated their incarceration every time they moved back and forth across the edges of the fenced camps. Yet, of course, as Chiang is careful to point out, ‘True freedom remained elusive’ for Japanese Americans living behind barbed wire (p. 173).

Indeed, one of the sad ironies of the Japanese American incarceration was that detainees made several meaningful and symbolic contributions to support a war being fought in the name of freedom at the same time as their own personal freedoms were denied. This contradiction was manifest nearly every time detainees interacted with the environment in and around the camps. When they cleared scrubland, dug irrigation ditches, and planted and harvested crops, detainees contributed to the war effort materially by engaging in what Chaing calls ‘environmental patriotism’ (chapter 5). But they often withheld their labour and went on strike to protest inadequate living conditions and demeaning outdoor work that unfairly exposed them to the environment of the arid West. In negotiating their encounters with the environment inside and outside camp fences, Japanese Americans performed their freedom both through loyalty to the United States and by satisfying individual and community desires and needs.

Chiang’s greatest contribution comes from connecting notions of Japanese American agency (or lack thereof), which have defined the study of their incarceration for many years, with a central tenet of environmental history that insists the non-human world also has agency capable of helping historians explain power relations between people and how they have changed over time. Incarceration is a denial of agency. But Chiang shows that despite detainees’ ‘state of relative dependence and their overall vulnerability … they found many ways to harness nature and assert some control over the terms and conditions of their confinement. In doing so, they often proclaimed their Americanness’ (p. 5). By highlighting their agency, not only in relation to the camp administrators and guards, but also in terms of a reciprocal relationship with the arid West, Chiang builds on work exploring environmental inequality by revealing that injustice was inextricably tied to much longer histories and understandings of place. ‘If they [detainees] could turn desolate land into productive fields, like the white pioneers before them’, Chiang argues, ‘their confinement might appear all the more undemocratic. The foreboding landscapes of the camps, in short, could become a source of power in their wartime struggles for inclusion’ (p. 98).

Yet, this quotation also contains one of several problematic word choices that Chiang uses throughout the book to describe the arid West where the camps were located. At various points, Chiang characterizes the environments where camps were located in pejorative terms (e.g. ‘desolate,’ ‘unforgiving,’ ‘foreboding,’ ‘unmediated,’ ‘harsh,’ ‘adverse,’ ‘oppressive’). Certainly, ample evidence makes clear that these qualitative descriptions reflect how administrators and detainees perceived the camp environments. But Chiang’s own use of this kind of language in her analysis is surprising considering that environmental historians have done a thorough job explaining how this privileges an outsider’s view (most often characterized as Euro-centric) of places that were none of those things to Indigenous peoples, especially given that two of the camps Chiang examines were located on Native American reservations.

Nature behind barbed wire offers an interesting perspective on the intersection of environment and injustice by exploring how Japanese Americans used their relationship with the non-human world to carve out greater control for themselves amidst wartime incarceration. At times, it is not clear how or why environmental history adds to our understanding of this history. Chiang does not always clearly explain why we need to understand the environment to understand the refusal of detainees to engage in arduous labour outdoors, or why they occasionally went on strike. Chiang insists that nature influenced their decisions, and she makes a convincing case for this. But as Chiang and others have so clearly articulated, Japanese Americans objected to dirty and disagreeable work, because they felt unjustly treated. The non-human world has agency in this story, but at times Chiang seems to confuse this with human agency. In the end, human oppression still explains this story better than nature behind barbed wire.