Heidi Nicholls is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has been researching the working conditions during the construction of the Navy Red Hill fuel tanks in the early 1940s.
Nicholls, who has Hawaiʻi ties, has been scouring the National Archives and is hosting a talk this weekend on what she's found so far.
She was born at Tripler Hospital and for a time lived at Hickam Air Force Base on Oʻahu. She returned to the islands for high school and was here doing research for her graduate work. She left just as news of the November 2021 fuel contamination emerged.
The Conversation talked to Nicholls about her research and her perspective as a military dependent.
"When I heard about the Red Hill spills, I just felt a profound sense of grief and kind of shock at the possibility of the aquifer being, you know, irreparably harmed and also that it was like a direct cause of the negligence of the military. And also, I, myself didn't know that the site existed, even being, you know, in military spaces," Nicholls said.
"I felt like as someone who's done research on the history of colonialism in Hawaiʻi, and someone who is from a military family, it was such an interesting and poignant and personal example of, you know, when the military enacts harm, but it also, in this case, was harming the military families themselves."
Nicholls worked with people at the National Archives to go through catalogs and find any mention of Red Hill. She said she found a lot of photos that had not widely been seen before.
"These workers, you know, were kind of caught up in something way bigger than themselves. And they lived there, they suffered in different ways. They weren't perfect people. And some of them even, you know, died there because of accidents on the worksite," she told HPR. "These men in the archives that you see just glimpses of in the dark in photographs, you know, they were also kind of made disposable, I think, by this project of the military, in their own time."
She said the photos also indicate that different ethnic groups were segregated during construction.
"We also know that the Japanese workers were discriminated against. They were kind of made to wear a special badge that marked them as Japanese, especially after Dec. 7, 1941."
Her webinar talk, "Archives of Life and Death at Red Hill Camp," is set for Saturday, Feb. 3. Click here to register.
This story aired on The Conversation on Jan. 29, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
