Mary Bourdukofsky, an Alaska Native, was at home on rugged St. Paul Island one Sunday in the summer of 1942 when her husband rushed breathlessly through the door from his weekly baseball game.

The federal government was in the process of forcing 881 Aleuts to move from their homes on the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to dank wartime internment camps in the rain forest of Southeast Alaska 1,500 miles away.
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Aleuts were not suspected of spying or sabotage, as were tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans interned after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

However, they were not allowed to leave the camps unless they were drafted into the military or coerced into working the Pribilof fur seal hunt, which brought millions of dollars to the U.S. government.
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“There was a lot of sickness at the camp,” said Jake Lestenkof, 73, who was 11 years old when his mother died of pneumonia at a camp at Funter Bay. “There was a lot of pneumonia and tuberculosis … . There were certainly no medical facilities or personnel.”

Sanitation and pipe systems were never installed. Residents drank water tainted with sewage and _ at one camp _ runoff from the expanding cemetery. One in 10 people died in the camps from 1942 to 1945, according to federal estimates cited in the film.

“It was terrible,” said Maria Turnpaugh, 78. “We lived in little shacks full of holes and no running water. People got sick all the time.”

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