Because Gruening and his colleagues had resisted the notion of Aleut internment, there were no plans in place. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships (“while eating breakfast,” an officer on Atka recalled—“the eggs were still on the table”) and dropped off in unfamiliar Southeast Alaska. They found this new environment unsettling. By all accounts, the large stands of trees unnerved them. “Feels funny,” the chief of the Atka tribe noted with alarm. “No room to walk.” The trees, though, were the least of the Aleuts’ problems. Their new “homes” were whatever spaces the navy
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