Crafting Survival: Chamorro and Okinawan Women’s Camp Labor in the Northern Mariana Islands, 1944–1946 / 生きるための工芸：北マリアナ諸島の米軍民間人収容所におけるチャモ ロ・沖縄女性の労働(1944–1946 年)

Abstract

Abstract: While Japanese and U.S. scholars have examined the U.S. narrative of liberating women in postwar Japan, the U.S. military’s internment of local women in the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI) further elucidates the contradictory nature of U.S. liberation. During World War II, U.S. forces captured and interned the local population of the islands in the name of liberation and protection from Japanese forces. Since Japan had previously colonized the NMI for three decades, these interned civilians included Chamorro and Refaluwasch (Native Pacific Islanders), as well as Okinawans, Koreans, and Japanese settlers. While interned at camps, these local Native and Asian women performed various forms of labor, including craft-making. I argue that interned women made crafts for their economic survival, responding to the U.S. military’s expectation of crafting as a key industry to represent the liberation of women and the rehabilitation of the local economy of the islands after Japanese rule. I also contend that crafting held a deeper cultural meaning, especially for Chamorro and Okinawan women, which escaped the attention of U.S. military officers and enabled the sustenance of Native practices. By analyzing U.S. military records and photographs, as well as women’s memoirs and crafts, this article demonstrates how Native and Asian women in the NMI creatively responded to the U.S. imperial projects of liberation and rehabilitation during and after WWII.