Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity

The Gerald Vizenor Continuum

Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Hauke, Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Hauke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315452197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

According to Kimberly Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor is "the most prolific Native American writer of the twentieth century, " and Christopher Teuton rightfully calls him "one of the most innovative and brilliant American Indian writers" today." With more than 40 books of fiction, poetry, life writing, essays, and criticism, his impact on literary and cultural theory, and specifically on Indigenous Studies, has been unparalleled.

This volume brings together some of the most distinguished experts on Vizenor's work from Europe and the United States. Original contributions by Gerald Vizenor himself, as well as by Kimberly M. Blaeser, A. Robert Lee, Kathryn Shanley, David L. Moore, Chris LaLonde, Alexandra Ganser, Cathy Covell Waegner, Sabine N. Meyer, Kristina Baudemann, and Billy J. Stratton provide fresh perspectives on theoretical concepts such as trickster discourse, postindian survivance, totemic associations, Native presence, artistic irony, and transmotion, and explore his lasting literary impact from Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart to his most recent novels and collections of poetry, Shrouds of White Earth, Chair of Tears, Blue Ravens, and Favor of Crows. The thematic sections focus on "Truth Games': Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics;" "'Chance Connections': Memory, Land, and Language;" and "'The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions': History and Futurity, " documenting that Vizenor's achievements are sociocultural and political as much they are literary in effect. With their emphasis on transdisciplinary, transnational research, the critical analyses, close readings, and theoretical outlooks collected here contextualize Gerald Vizenor's work within different literary traditions and firmly place him within the American canon.

1
Expeditions in France

Native American Indians in the First World War

Gerald Vizenor

Arthur Elm enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces from Oneida, Wisconsin, and served with a machine gun company in the Thirty-Second Infantry Division. He was wounded in the chest at Cierges, France, and recovered with blood transfusions.

“After this, I didn’t know what I was. I was a mixture of Indian, Irish, and Swede,” he told the photographer and author Joseph Dixon (qtd. in Krouse 3). Arthur told ironic stories in spite of his wounds, situational blood, and empire wars, and he was sensible about service in the military. “It ain’t a bad life. Some guys kick about it, but I don’t see if they are true Americans why they kick. Army life has got to be hard. You can’t make heaven out of it” (qtd. in Krouse 4).

Arthur returned at the end of the war and “a guy on the boat called out, ‘Who wants to re-enlist?’ He meant it as an insult to the Army. I felt it was a pretty dirty remark. He didn’t appreciate the kind of country he is living in, or the kind of country we have been fighting for” (qtd. in Krouse 5).

John Clement Beaulieu, my great uncle, served in an engineer regiment with the American Expeditionary Forces in France. He constructed roads and bridges under enemy fire, and forty years later he told me stories about the lovely women he got to know during the Great War.

Otto Dix, an expressionist painter, was a soldier in a machine gun unit in the German Army. He received an Iron Cross for bravery and later created “unforgiving art” of the First World War (Smith). His portrayals of war were “hideous, freakish scenes of human misery and disfigured faces,” noted Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Otto Dix, in contrast to my great uncle John Clement Beaulieu and Arthur Elm, scarcely told stories of romance, and certainly did not create ironic stories of France.

“Armistice Signed, End of the War! Berlin Seized by Revolutionists; New Chancellor Begs for Order; Ousted Kaiser Flees to Holland” was the huge banner headline of The New York Times on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. The Treaty of Versailles and the revolutions in Germany and Russia deposed two empire unions and gave rise to political extremism, nationalism, and communism, such as the Bolsheviks, the Nazi Party, and the National Fascist Party in Italy.

The breakdown of political and aesthetic credibility turned many survivors of the war into extremists, allegorists, and creative storiers. Jazz, Dance, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism generated avant-garde art, music, literature, an exuberance of cultural conversions, singular experiences, and exotic traces of remembrance.

Modris Eksteins observed in “Memory and the Great War” that “André Breton, the surrealist, spoke of the ‘crisis of the object.’ But, as the ideas of Sigmund Freud suggested, there was a ‘crisis of the subject’ too. Psychoanalytic theory had a special importance in the search for a new reality” (312).

The Native Anishinaabe have endured three empire world wars, the first of which was in the late eighteenth century in North America. “The Ojib-ways figured in almost every battle which was fought during these bloody wars, on the side of the French against the British,” wrote William Warren in the History of the Ojibway Nation (194). The Anishinaabe viewed with sorrow the “final delivery of the Northwestern French forts into the hands of the conquering British” (195). The cultural bonds “which had been so long riveting between the French and Ojibways were not so easily to be broken” (195). Warren was Anishinaabe and published the first reliable history of Natives in the late nineteenth century.

Blue Ravens, my historical novel, is the first published narrative about Native American Indians, mostly my relatives from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, who served in the American Expeditionary Forces.

Ignatius Vizenor and his younger brother Lawrence were at home on the White Earth Reservation that Sunday morning, June 28, 1914, when a slight twenty-year-old Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on a narrow street in Sarajevo.

That obscure assassination carried out some five thousand miles away was the symbolic start of the First World War, a chance moment of political violence that caused a deadly chain reaction and implicated empires, monarchies, autocratic and egalitarian states, entire continents, the colonial world, and no less the Anishinaabe of the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.

The “Great War marked a break in Europe’s history,” declared Margaret MacMillan in The War that Ended Peace. “Before 1914, Europe for all its problems had hope that the world was becoming a better place and that human civilization was advancing. After 1918 that faith was no longer possible for Europeans. As they looked back at their lost world before the war, they could feel only a sense of loss and waste” (640).

John Clement Beaulieu, William Hole in the Day, Ignatius and Lawrence Vizenor, Allen Trotterchaud, Robert Fairbanks, Louis Swan, John Martin Squirrel, and forty other young Anishinaabe men in Becker County on the White Earth Reservation served in the American Expeditionary Forces.

Citizens of the White Earth Reservation read some of the gruesome stories of the war, the Lusitania torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915, the Battle of Passchendaele and the Somme, and other curious place names in The Tomahawk, an independent weekly newspaper published by Augustus Hudon Beaulieu.¹

General John Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expedition-ary Forces in France, lost more than twenty-six thousand “dead in little more than a month” in the October 1918 offensive at Meuse-Argonne in France, “a carnage far worse than the Civil War battles at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor put together” (Reynolds 35). Pershing was fortunate that the “death toll never sank in at home, unlike in Britain after the Somme, thanks to a combination of tight military censorship, embedded reporters who maintained an ‘enthusiastic silence’ about the body count,” and “front-page speculations about the impending armistice” (Reynolds 35).²

Private Ignatius Vizenor served in the Thirtieth Infantry Division, and his brother Corporal Lawrence Vizenor served in the Thirty-Third Infantry Division. Ignatius was killed in action on October 8, 1918, at Montbréhain, France, on the very same day that his brother Lawrence Vizenor received the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in combat at Bois de Fays (Nelson 4).³

Private Charles Beaupré, a close friend from the White Earth Reservation, was also killed in action on October 8, 1918, at Saint-Quentin, France. An airplane pilot noted in his diaries that the weather that fateful day was murky, and a cold misty rain covered the devastated countryside.

I visited the same sites of combat at Bony, Montbréhain, Saint-Quentin, and Bois de Fays on October 8, 2011.⁴ On the same day of the month almost a hundred years later, the weather was the same, cold and murky, but the landscape was rich, green, and with bright yellow tracks of rapeseed flowers. The traces of bodies and shattered bones of thousands of soldiers were forever harrowed into that gorgeous landscape. Memories of that wicked empire war remained at every turn, crossroad, river, mound, and in the many military cemeteries.

Basile Beaulieu observed in Blue Ravens that “[t]here were more American Ford ambulances on the road than motor cars on the entire White Earth Reservation” (117).

The wounded were on ships at sea, and the dead soldiers, pieces of young bodies, shattered bones, were buried in the earth, some by tillage of mince and morsel, and others by name and poignant ceremonies at military cemeteries. The larger human remains were tagged by religious order, covered and stacked on trucks. The earth would return once more to mustard and sugar beets, and rivers would carry forever the bloody scent of these ancient scenes of war out to the sea.

(111)

Representative Julius Kahn of California introduced a resolution shortly after the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, that “called for the immediate organization of ‘ten or more regiments of Indian cavalry as part of the military forces of the United States, to be known as the North American Indian Cavalry,’” wrote Thomas Britten in American Indians in World War I (38). The proposed legislation of an “Indian Cavalry” was actually considered by several representatives, and two other measures to segregate soldiers were introduced by Representative Charles Carter of Oklahoma and Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania.⁵

The “Red Progressives,” or the Society of American Indians, and the Indian Rights Association resisted the initiatives to segregate soldiers. The Society argued in favor of integrated units and pointed out that “segregated units encouraged the maintenance of racial stereotypes, undermined Indian progress, and gave Native Americans an inferior social status” (Britten 44).

Arthur Parker and Gertrude Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, were prominent members of the Society of American Indians, and they “strongly favored the participation of American Indians in the European conflict as a way to demonstrate American Indian patriotism” (Camurat). The Secretary of War and several senior military officers ruled against the segregation of Native American Indians in the military.⁶

Wassaja, or Carlos Montezuma, the distinguished Yavapai medical doctor, declared that Natives had been mistreated by the government and should not be forced to enlist and fight for the United States. Montezuma argued that the government had no “legitimate authority to require that they perform military service” (Dennis 66).

Matthew Dennis pointed out in Red, White, and Blue Letter Day, “Native people served not only in uniform but in striking numbers on the home front as well, with service in the Red Cross and heavy investment in Liberty Bonds” (66).

Native American Indians invested more than eight million dollars in several initial issues of Liberty Bonds. By the end of the war, “Native Americans had purchased over 25 million dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds, a per capita investment of about 75 dollars” wrote Thomas Britten in American Indians in World War I (133).

Native American soldiers were selected as combat scouts more often than others, and served as code talkers, but were not segregated as a federal or military policy. The Choctaw, Lakota, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Chippewa, Anishinaabe, Oneida, and other Native languages were used to deliver secure military messages by telephone. The Germans were not able to translate the structure, syntax, and metaphors of oral languages. The French had more access to telephone systems in communities.

Russell Barsh pointed out in “American Indians in the Great War” that the “War Department estimated that 17,313 Indians registered for the draft and 6,509, representing roughly 13 percent of all adult Indian men, were inducted. This did not include voluntary enlistment.” The Indian Office estimated that “at least half of all Indians who served were volunteers. Total Indian participation was therefore probably 20 to 30 percent of adult Indian men,” compared to 15 percent of all adult American men who served in the war (277).

Barsh estimated that at “least 5 percent of all Indian servicemen died in action, compared to 1 percent for the American Expeditionary Forces as a whole” (278). About eight percent of the Anishinaabe soldiers from Becker County on the White Earth Reservation were killed in action or died from combat wounds.

Britten cited the high number of casualties and estimated that selected “Indian people suffered even higher casualty rates. The Pawnees, for example, lost 14 percent of their soldiers, and the various Sioux people lost an average of 10 percent. Given their often perilous duties as scouts, snipers, and messengers, the high casualty rate among Native Americans is not surprising” (82).

Only citizens were required by law to register for the draft. Natives “demanded that if the federal government declared they were citizens and thus subject to the draft, they should also be enfranchised” (Britten 54). The Bureau of Indian Affairs dithered on the distinction of citizenship and then deviously “turned the entire matter over to the draft boards,” observed Thomas Britten. “Because they were designed to be flexible and to respond to local needs, the draft boards operated with considerable autonomy” (54).

The Becker County Draft Board on the White Earth Reservation carried out the necessary requirements of the Selective Service Act, the registration of eligible men in the entire county. The total draft “registration for the United States was 23,456,021. Minnesota registered 533,717, and 4,494 of these were from Becker County” (Nelson 1). Nearly 15 percent, or 651 men of the total number registered for the draft in Becker County were selected for military service.

A total of 1,254 men were either drafted or volunteered in Becker County. Fifty-four soldiers in the entire county, or about four percent, died in service (Nelson 1). That number was four times greater than the number of soldiers who died in the entire American Expeditionary Forces.

A total of forty-eight Anishinaabe soldiers were drafted or volunteered as residents of Becker County on the White Earth Reservation. Four reservation soldiers, or about eight percent of those who served, died in action in France.

Private William Hole in the Day was born on the White Earth Reservation. He first served in the United States Navy during the Spanish American War, and then in the North Dakota National Guard on the Mexican Border. Hole in the Day enlisted in Canada and served in the First Central Ontario Regiment in France. He was poisoned in a gas attack and died on June 4, ...