Senninbari, literally ‘thousand-person stitches,’ were talismans of good luck created for Japanese and Japanese-American soldiers during WWII in which 1000 french knots are embroidered by 1000 different people onto a clothing item or piece of fabric to symbolize the community behind the soldier. The knots were considered to add fortification to the fabric, but often resulted in parasitic damage to the pieces on the battlefield due to the number of punctures.

When I visited the site of the Topaz Relocation Center, no buildings remained, but thousands and thousands of rusted nails were embedded into the ground. To me they became vestiges of internees in the same way each french knot implicated an individual on the senninbari.