Fort Sill Protest (film)

Video documentary of the 2019 Fort Sill protest coordinated on June 22, 2019, by a coalition of progressive organizations including Tsuru for Solidarity, American Indian Movement (AIM) Indian Territory, Dream Action Oklahoma, Black Lives Matter OKC, and the Autonomous Brown Berets. This documentary includes interviews with activists, community members, and former incarcerees; news coverage of the event; highlights of speeches from the protest; and footage of their interactions with the military police. Speakers and interviewees highlight the significance of Fort Sill as a historic site of oppression, first with Native Americans imprisoned in a boarding school and prison camp, then as an incarceration site for Japanese Americans during WWII, and most recently as a detainment center for immigrant and refugee children. The documentary connects the incarceration of Japanese Americans with current immigration detention policies that have led to the separation of children from their families. The film urges solidarity amongst communities impacted by detention policies from the past and to the present. The film was produced by the organization Tsuru for Solidarity, in collaboration with Nikkei Progressives.

Filmmaker Alan Kondo had been on the staff of Visual Communications (VC) in the 1970s before becoming a financial planner. Upon his retirement in 2019, he began making films again. ^[1] He told former VC colleague Eddie Wong that he was initially planning to cover the upcoming Crystal City pilgrimage when Tsuru for Solidarity organized a protest against the planned detention of 1,400 asylum-seeking children at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Kondo made a spur of the moment decision to record the protest as part of a larger project. Upon reflection, Kondo states, "But when I went to Fort Sill, I met all these people—Japanese Americans from all over the country, Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, progressive white people—and they were all working together really well. They clicked immediately and it was all very supportive—wonderful people. And all of a sudden, I felt happy like I was fighting back. So this is just my way of fighting back." ^[2]

Might also like Crystal City Pilgrimage, October 31 to November 3, 2019 (2019)