Militarized Friendship Narratives: Enemy Aliens and Indigenous Outsiders in Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower

Sumiko read in the Chronicle that Poston was the only Nikkei relocation center administered by the Office of Indian Affairs. Maybe that was why security seemed rather lax here. Supposedly, the other relocation centers were run by the War Relocation Authority. The camps for Issei like Jiichan and Uncle were run by the Department of Justice and were more like prisons.-Cynthia Kadohata, WeedflowerIn her 2006 children's novel Weedflower, Cynthia Kadohata depicts an unlikely friendship between Sumiko, a Japanese-American girl, and Frank, a Mohave boy, in a time of war. The novel's portrayal of this friendship mobilizes a critique of militarism by suggesting the potential of cross-racial encounters to transform the logic of state power in settler colonialism. Kadohata explores militarism's reach into the social and familial fabric of Americans' lives outside the traditional battlefield. By considering how military rule shapes friendships and the encounters of everyday life, Kadohata imagines how individuals living in these spaces can both sustain and challenge military efforts. This broader perspective on war echoes feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe's (1983) longstanding work on querying the battlefield as just one locus of militarism and as a specific expression of patriarchy more generally. Looking at militarism through everyday encounters instead of exclusively through the battlefield thus allows a consideration of not just war itself but also other structures of power and domination that underlie war and extend from it. Instead of detailing the exceptionalism of World War II and therefore of the internment of Japanese Americans, Kadohata connects both to a longer social and political history that has shaped relations between racial groups within the United States. Though Kadohata foregrounds war as the enabling condition for unlikely friendships, those very friendships also challenge the logic of defining people outside one's own community as enemies or simply outsiders, undermining the militarized vision of war as a clash between different groups of people. In an imaginative fictional account, then, Kadohata enacts the transformative potential of alternative contact between Asians and Natives in the United States.Motivated by her father's internment at the Colorado River Relocation Center, Kadohata sets her novel in this very camp, which was nicknamed "Poston" after Charles Debrille Poston, the first Superintendent for Indian Affairs in Arizona. Poston was the only war relocation center administered by a separate federal agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); even the Gila River Relocation Center, the other camp located on Indian reser vation land in Arizona, remained under the administration of the War Relocation Authority (WRA).1 This setting allows for the possibility of contact between a Japanese-American internee girl, Sumiko, and a Mohave boy from outside the camp, Frank; more importantly, it connects the war camps to the context of Native removal and dispossession. Focusing on the encounter between Sumiko and Frank, Kadohata shifts attention away from the uniqueness of war internment for Japanese Americans to the longstanding histories of incarceration that have characterized the US government's treatment of nonwhite peoples.In this essay, I argue that the militarized friendship narratives at the heart of the novel enable a critique of settler-colonial militarism. While focusing on Kadohata's novel, I also turn to a range of cultural and critical conversations in political theory, literary criticism, historical research, and documentary film to explore how this militarized friendship narrative resonates with broader discourses on alternative contact. I consider how Kadohata's fictional narrative offers an open-ended consideration of war that both engages radical critiques of the US nation-state and reveals the possible co-option of difference into liberalism's narratives of freedom and equality. …