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Lutie Marshal Miller taught at the Poston Internment Camp. The Poston Internment Camp was a detention camp for Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants from Japan that operated from the spring of 1942 until November 28, 1945. It was officially named the Colorado River Relocation Camp. The imprisonment of Japanese Americans was authorized by Executive Order 9066, which President Franklin Roosevelt signed on February 1942 in response to Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 11, 1941. On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, which established the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency to administer permanent detention camps for Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants. Beginning in March 1942, the American government relocated approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants from their homes on the West Coast and into ten WRA detention camps in the interior of the American West.

Poston was located in Yuma (now in La Paz) County in southwestern Arizona, near the California border. At 71,000 acres, Poston was the largest geographically of the ten concentration camps operated by the WRA and contained three separate camps. It was located on land owned by the Colorado River Indian Reservation, and was built on their territory despite objections from the Tribal Council. During the peak of its operation, Poston contained over 17,000 prisoners, making it the third largest “city” in the state of Arizona. A lumber shortage meant that the structures at Poston were not sound, and the people who were imprisoned there suffered extreme heat and cold. The population suffered disease, including an outbreak of tuberculosis, for which they received subpar care.

Beginning in the summer of 1942, prisoners began withholding their work in strikes to protest the poor living and working conditions. In November 1942, following acts of violence from guards onto prisoners, inmates in Camp I deployed a large-scale general strike which lasted about a week before the camp administration agreed to the stipulations of the prisoners. The strike also lead to administrators allowing prisoners greater say in the running of the camps, and no subsequent work stoppages were attempted. Of the ten concentration camps, Poston was equal with Heart Mountain for having the largest number of draft resistors. Poston was closed in November 1945 after over three years of operation. After the camps were closed, its operations and property were returned to the Native Americans who owned the land. In 1992, with support from the Colorado River Indian Tribes, the Poston Memorial Monument was erected. (Source: Thomas Y. Fujita-Rony, “Poston (Colorado River,” Denson Encyclopedia.)