The bureaucracy was tangled even further in 19, when the US military, seeing the Aleutians as both a possible enemy target and a potential launching point for an American attack on Japan, initiated a military buildup in the islands. When war loomed with Japan in the 1930s, the Aleuts’ fate was in the hands of an array of overlapping government departments. The rest of the Aleut communities fell under the purview of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and its subsidiary, the Alaska Indian Service. Paul-north of the main Aleutian chain, where the rich seal hunt took place-were overseen by the Fish and Wildlife Service. UNDER AMERICAN RULE, the several hundred remaining Aleut people were classed as “wards” of the state. (The United States would eventually place restrictions on the use of both Russian and Aleut in the islands, and Methodist missionaries would arrive hoping to re-convert the converts, with limited success.) They lived a kind of hybrid life: seeking subsistence from the sea while readily adopting modern conveniences like plumbing, electric light and range stoves, despite their isolation. The people, who had long since adopted Russian surnames, placed gold-leaf icons and relics in their churches and attended school in Russian and Aleut-an Orthodox priest had created an alphabet for their native language early in the nineteenth century. The church became the centre of Aleut life. A decimated Aleut population, reduced by as much as 80 or 90 percent, was solidly converted to Russian Orthodoxy by the time the Alaskan territory was sold to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867. The discovery of the islands’ rich sea otter population prompted a mad rush for furs and, eventually, a bloody Russian conquest and colonization. Unlike many neighbouring indigenous groups in Siberia and mainland Alaska, the Aleuts remained isolated until the arrival of the first Russian explorers in 1741.

Even today, bald eagles lounge on lampposts and roam the streets of Unalaska, the Aleutians’ largest town, common as gulls. The ocean provided them with an abundance of whales, seals, salmon, halibut and shellfish the islands also attracted an annual migration of millions of birds. For centuries, the Aleuts’ daily activities revolved around the water: they fished and hunted in baidarkas, lean traditional kayaks most often made from the hides of sea lions. The remote, volcanic Aleutian Islands have been home to the Aleuts (or the Unangan-meaning “the people”-as many now call themselves) for thousands of years. The Aleutian Islands are bald humps that rise dramatically out of the pacific in a scattered chain around 2,000 kilometres long: treeless, with volcanic peaks that top out nearly 3,000 metres above sea level, they look like rolling alpine meadows that descend abruptly into the ocean.

Off its tip, an arc of islands runs further west yet-its westernmost outpost, Attu, lies just over a thousand kilometres from Japan. ON THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST of Alaska, a long peninsula stretches out into the vast Pacific Ocean and forms the southern boundary of the Bering Sea. It would be decades before the haunted survivors told their stories. Afterwards, life on the islands would never quite revert back to its previous stability: alcoholism would take hold and some villages would never be repopulated. It would result in three years of suffering and the death of more than a tenth of the Aleuts in the camps. The evacuation was prompted partly by a sense of paternal benevolence and responsibility but was conditioned by racist attitudes. The trees, more than anything else, represented the strangeness and terror of their sudden relocation. And so the United States government had brought their native occupants, the Aleuts, here, to a handful of makeshift camps in the coastal rainforest of the Alaskan panhandle, to wait out the inferno. Japanese bombs had fallen on Dutch Harbor, and Japanese troops occupied the westernmost islands in the chain. The Second World War had stormed the Aleutians, a far-flung string of islands off Alaska’s southwestern coast. She had come-they had all come-from their treeless islands, against their will, to this rainy slice of dense, damp forest, wedged between mountains and ocean. But she felt trapped once she stood beneath their branches. She'd found the trees interesting, in the books.

'I used to look at them in school books,' a woman recalled, seventy-one years after she first saw them. The towering hemlocks and the Sitka spruce the scrubby shore pines and the leafy alders.

Funter bay internment camp cemetery