What American Buddhism Looks Like: Solidarity for Immigrants at Fort Sill

By Duncan Ryuken Williams | | Buddhistdoor Global

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a three-part essay recounting a 20 July protest by American Buddhists at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where plans were underway to expand facilities holding detained immigrants. In this account, Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams, a Buddhist scholar and Soto Zen priest, writes of “Naming Names: Memorializing Our Interlinked Histories.” You can read more in our news coverage: Tsuru for Solidarity Takes Peaceful Action to Protest Mass Detention of Immigrants in the US and see the first part of Rev. Williams’ essay here: At Fort Sill, a Prayer That History Would Not Repeat Itself (Tricycle). Before leaving the Fort Sill fence to attend a rally in nearby Shepler Square Park, Rev. Egyoku Nakao, the Japanese American abbot emeritus of the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), and I took a brief detour to pay homage to Kanesaburo Oshima, the father of 11 children who had run small businesses in Kona, Hawai‘i, before being shot in the back of the head by a guard at Fort Sill in May 1942. Our fellow Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Rev. Jiko Nakade (the abbot of Kona Daifukuji Soto Zen Mission and granddaughter of Kanesaburo Oshima) had sent special maile lei from Hawai‘i as a flower offering for the memorial service. Instead of randomly leaving them at the highway median, where we had set up the ceremonial altar, we draped them over the cannon at the Fort Sill sign at Bentley Gate, a bigger version of the weapon used to end his life.

Our role at the Shepler Square Park rally was to perform a Buddhist memorial service in ever-widening circles of inclusion. We began with a tribute to Kanesaburo Oshima with a letter from the family read by Rev. Egyoku Nakao, one of only a handful of Japanese Americans to have served as the head of an American Zen Center. The letter written by his granddaughter noted that his “untimely death behind barbed wire was the source of great sorrow and trauma for his wife Matsu Oshima and their 11 children, who had been patiently awaiting grandfather’s return to Kona since the night he was unjustly taken away after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Grandfather Kanesaburo did eventually return to his family, but in the form of ashes, carried back to Hawai‘i by my father Noboru Oshima, the eldest of the Oshima children, at the end of WWII.”

We then turned to the idea that this Buddhist memorial service would not be just about one life, but a remembrance of the interlinked histories of many communities. Rev. William Briones, head minister of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple (one of the oldest Japanese American temples in North America), served as the chant leader for this part of the ceremony. He prefaced the ritual with a reflection on how, as a Mexican American Buddhist priest serving a historic Japanese American sangha, what is happening to migrant children is personal; his own grandparents crossed the border without papers in the early 1900s. This memorial service was about making manifest the interlinked histories of communities that have been targeted for exclusion from America, placed into indefinite detention, separated from their families in migration, and experienced death—naming people who might otherwise be relegated to the ash heap of forgotten history. As the chanting began, we invited Michael Topaum, the spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement, to bring to the altar Buddhist memorial tablets, on which he had written down the names of the Kiowa Chiefs—White Bear, Lone Wolf, Sitting Bear, and Big Tree—leaders of the indigenous peoples who were moved to southwestern Oklahoma in 1867.

Rev. Ryuji Hayashi of the Los Angeles Koyasan Buddhist Temple, whose predecessor Bishop Seytsu Takahashi had been interned at Fort Sill during the Second World War, approached the altar next with the names of four Japanese immigrants who died during their incarceration in Oklahoma: Kanesaburo Oshima, Ichiro Shimoda, Alessandro Ouchi, and Shiro Y. Nakahata.

The final offering of names on Buddhist memorial tablets was dedicated to the 10 young people who died in the past 14 months at the border or in US detention centers. Whether it was one-year-old Mariee Juárez from Guatemala, who passed away from a respiratory infection, two-year-old Valeria Martinez from El Salvador, who drowned in the Rio Bravo alongside her father, or 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez from Guatemala, who was shot and killed by a border agent, there is a real human cost from the “zero tolerance” policy aimed at deterrence. The name of the seven other migrant children who have died—Wilmer Josue Ramirez Vasquez (aged two), Gurupreet Kaur (aged six), Jakelin Amel Rosmery Caal Marquin (aged seven), Felipe Gomez Alonzo (aged eight), Darlyn Cristabel Cordova Valle (aged 10), Juan de Leon Gutierrez (aged 16), and Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez (aged 16)—were written on tablets by Rev. Briones and brought to the altar by 10 young Dreamers wearing “Close the Camps” t-shirts.