Federal policies were withered promises.
The obvious burdens of the Great Depression were overcome with the spirited motion of the Ice Woman and Niinag Trickster, and several other puppets that my brother created later at the Bonus March in Washington.
The White Earth Reservation has always been at risk, because the separation of natives on federal exclaves was never intended to encourage enterprise, to nurture curiosity, creative art, music, or literature, or to plainly advance the principles of justice and liberty. The nasty exclaves were contrived to exploit natural resources at the crude expense of native totemic rights, but these predictable deceptions actually gave rise to resistance and the steady subversion of federal policies.
The natives were dirt poor, several timber companies had cut down most of the white pine, and the beaver and other totemic animals had been decimated in the fur trade. The great comedown of the national economy and the untold breadlines turned the cities into new reservations without the tease of treaties. Only the memories of bloody war scenes changed our art, not the ironies of poverty. The older men on the reservation were marginal trappers, and yet native families were steadfast and supported the soldiers with the purchase of Liberty Bonds. Native women who were too poor to buy bonds packed war bandages, and the rate of native combat casualties was much higher than that of any other order of soldiers in the First World War. More than the Germans, more than the French, more than the British, but not more than the high casualties of the colonial soldiers from Asia and Africa, and never more casualties than the African American soldiers who served in combat with the mighty Harlem Hellfighters.
Native veterans, my mother, and thousands of other natives on reservations and in cities were flat broke at the end of the war, destitute ten years later, and the apathetic federal government delayed the repayment of the bond money and dickered with the bonus money promised to veterans of the war. President Herbert Hoover vetoed the whole bonus for veterans and at the same time favored the rich, especially the millionaire and financier Andrew Mellon, the United States secretary of the treasury. The rich became even richer during the war, and workers who stayed home were advanced with higher salaries at the same time that soldiers faced the horrors of mustard gas and heavy artillery in combat. The very same government that advertised national patriotism to recruit native soldiers, and then touted war bonds on reservations, carried out policies of separatism. Most natives who served were not recognized as citizens of the country. Later, the abuse of veterans and the veto of the bonus by the president became the incentive to muster the Bonus Expeditionary Force, a great bond of memories, truth stories, and soldiery unions of culture, race, and liberty.
The union of veterans defied the politics of race.
Hermann Everhart, a retired bank president, one of the prosperous heirs of the war, proposed to purchase forty of the abstract blue ravens for an unnamed collector of native art through a gallery in Berlin, but the banker turned down the three abstract paintings that represented with names the native women from the reservation who had served in the First World War.
Blue Raven shunned the elegant banker that afternoon at the station and refused to accept the specific offer because it dishonored our cousins and the others. By Now served as a nurse and treated combat wounds on the Hindenburg Line. Ellanora Beaulieu enlisted as a nurse and was assigned to the American Army of Occupation in Germany. She served in a hospital, healed the enemy soldiers, and then she died of influenza in the same hospital. The painting in her name showed an enormous detached shadow of her broken face as a blue raven in flight over an ambulance and razed landscape, with heavy traces of rouge on the feathers. The blue shadow reached beyond the deckle edge of the paper, the features of a raven and human with no boundaries.
Everhart expressed his regret for the slight of native nurses, doubled the purchase price, and accepted the entire collection of original blue raven portrayals. He obviously was ready to pay more because he traveled with a wooden crate to transport the art. The abstract totemic paintings were packed and shipped by train to New York, then by a slow boat to Europe, and delivered to a gallery in Berlin, Germany.
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TOMBSTONE BONUS
The United States Congress passed the World War Adjustment Act on Monday, May 19, 1924. Five years and hundreds of promises after the armistice of the First World War, and hardly anyone noticed the war bonus legislation that most veterans turned down. The Bonus Act provided only limited loans, not a real bonus of cash, and the loans would be deducted with interest from final cash payment in some twenty years.
The Indian Citizenship Act was passed two weeks later, one more overdue bonus. Reservation natives were declared citizens of the United States of America. The act was ironic, of course, and with no trace of remorse. The provisions of citizenship would not “in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” The white pine stumps, dams, and flooded wild rice beds were the ironic provisions of “other property.”
The Bonus Act empowered tricky loans, and was rightly named the Tombstone Bonus because most natives would probably be dead by the time the government dealt with payments. Most veterans were on the road in search of a meal and a place to live and work years before the Great Depression, and on federal reservations most natives were the designated prisoners of poverty.
The United States Veterans Bureau was directed to deliver the Adjusted Service Certificates of the Bonus Act on the birthdate of each veteran, the pretense of a money gift. Government policies were seldom explained, and the reason certificates were delivered on the birthdays of veterans remained a great mystery.
White Earth Reservation veterans waited and waited to compare the birthday certificates. My certificate arrived two months after my birthday. Aloysius never received one, and later we learned the document had been delivered by mistake to Aloysius Hermanutz, the principal priest at Saint Benedict’s Mission.
John Clement Beaulieu, my cousin, who had served with the combat engineers, raised a stink that the certificates were one more hoax of federal agents, and the government ruse became a game to create the most outrageous stories of the delayed secret birthday certificates.
Certificate names were erased in bright light.
Certificates arrived only on cloudy days.
Parchment certificates were used as ledgers.
Certificates were shunted in cattle cars.
The Ice Woman lured the delivery agents.
Hungry packs of mongrels ate the certificates.
Certificates were traded for white lightning.
Certificates were treaties held in trust.
Certificates were no better than land allotments.
My crafty bonus certificate was delivered on a cloudy afternoon, and with my name and the exact amount clearly printed on the parchment paper, but the provisions of the take back loan with interest were hard to read in the fine print. Truly, the great government hoaxers had prepared a late birthday Tombstone Bonus.
IT IS HEREBY CERTIFIED that pursuant to The World War Adjustment Act and in conformity with the laws of the United States, the amount named, FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE Dollars, less any indebtedness including interest, lawfully incurred and due hereon, shall become due and payable on the first day of January 1945, to Basile Hudon Beaulieu, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota.
The certificate was payable after my fiftieth birthday, and the money would have lost value in that time, and most veterans were angry and rejected the deceit of a puny loan provided by the Tombstone Bonus.
The bonus was one more withered promise.
Dummy waved with the diva puppets in hand and the mongrels bayed on the platform that morning we departed from the Ogema Station for Washington. My brother had waited for me some twenty years ago to board the train for the first time to visit art museums in Minneapolis, the second departure from the station was our military muster to the war in France, the third was our search for work,
and the last time we made tracks was our return to Paris the year Warren Harding was inaugurated president. He endorsed assimilation policies and undermined native water and mineral rights on the White Earth Reservation. We had returned to the reservation three years later when Harding died and the Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Salo issued special train tickets for Lawrence Star Boy Vizenor, Paul Plucky Fairbanks, Aloysius Blue Raven Hudon Beaulieu, and for Basile Hudon Beaulieu to travel from Ogema to Washington with a train change in Chicago. John Leecy paid for the train tickets, one more gesture of respect for our combat service in the war. Star Boy was an infantry veteran decorated for bravery, and Plucky was a native fancy dance soldier who earned his nickname for bold maneuvers behind enemy lines. He stole cigarettes, tea, biscuits, and potatoes from the Germans. Most of the plucky booty had been stolen earlier from the French and Americans. We were brothers, cousins, and outraged veterans on our way to serve in the Bonus Expeditionary Force, that crucial war between the bonus veterans and Herbert Hoover, the crude political engineer of the Great Depression and the president of the United States.
Blue Raven amused the children and their mothers on the train with the hand puppets. No, he never raised the pecker of the trickster, but instead he created the first hand puppet in our bonus patrol, suitably named Herbert Tombstone. The head of the puppet was made with a small condensed milk can, perfectly dented with bright eyes and a wide moustache scratched into the rusty metal. The droopy fingers were braided twine, and the presidential puppet was dressed in tatters, sleeves of rags, a chest of dirty velvet, and heavy canvas shoes. The hand puppet wore a red banner, “Tombstone Treaty Bonus.”
The children on the train were truly enchanted by the presence of the ragged and chatty tin can, and the scenes of the hand puppet were more believable because most of the children were familiar with the Tin Man in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a novel written for children by L. Frank Baum. The train might have become the Land of Oz for a few moments between stations, and the children worried about the pet dog, Toto. We teased my brother because he was a very convincing tin head hand talker, and later he painted the bright Flag of Oz with the green star on the banner of the puppet named Herbert Tombstone.
The train swayed through the vast mausoleums of industry, gray, black, and shiny that afternoon in the rain, and abandoned with no shadows, no trace of urgency, no factory workers, and slowly clacked into Grand Central Station at Chicago. We had arrived on May 30, 1932, Decoration Day, in a station of stony stares, rumors, and the misery of the Great Depression. Yet there were ritzy women at hand with fur collars, and the moneyed men were dressed in tailored suits. Plucky named the dressy tourists the Puppets of the Pullman Cars. The men outside the station were downcast in gray fedoras and packed in rows on every shabby corner in the light rain, and downcast women hovered with their gaunt children at the entrance to the station, the untold sufferers of the dead economy.
Plucky waved at people around the station and worried when no one returned the friendly gesture. “Natives joke about misery, laugh over poverty, shout out at the bears, but even the smiles of this city have been stolen by Hoover and the monogrammed bankers of Wall Street.” Not a single smile was visible, and we realized the futility of the hand puppets in the world of hungry strangers.
Chicago was a reservation of newcomers with no sense of chance or easy way to portray the contortions of empires, the brokers of democracy, and the native humor of poverty. The hand puppets were ready to treat and tease the children, but the elders were more prepared for vaudeville, popular songs, and crappy public poetry, than spirited puppet shows. The notable exception, we learned much later, was the grand Modicut Yiddish puppet theater created by Zuni Maud and Yosi Cutler in New York City.
Plucky was out of tune in the very city that was built with the white pine cut from the forests on the White Earth Reservation. He never attended a reservation government school, and his easy gestures were romantic, but mostly with a sense of irony.
Star Boy was distracted by the beggary.
An older man rested on a wooden case just outside the train station, chalky gray as the marble columns, and there were many stories about old native men with granite faces, but poverty was not the same in the city. The chalky man wore a threadbare suit, his black shoes were rough, oversized, the soles separated, and he smartly saluted my cousin Lawrence Vizenor. We were sidetracked by his generous manner, long gray hair, and toothy smile. Bright teeth with no caries revealed more about his stature than the suit and salute, more than shoes and posture. Somehow he seemed to know our cousin was a decorated veteran, but he did not know that my brother loathed the poetry the old man was about to read. At that moment the toothy man rolled his shoulders back and with a resonant voice recited selected stanzas of a timely poem, “Decoration Day,” by one of the most famous poets in the nation, and truly despised on the White Earth Reservation, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest
On this field of the Grounded Arms,
Where foes no more molest,
Nor sentry’s shot alarms!
……………………………
Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
A Wigwam Coffee tin was prominently placed on the wooden case with a neatly printed message, “Out of Work Teacher, Poems for Food.” Plucky was captivated by the sound of his grand voice, the gestures of the old man, and the steady sentiments of the poem, but my brother was not ready to turn back our steady mockery of the poet and the mawkish images of the “tents of green,” and the “foes that no more molest.” The Civil War soldiers were dead and buried in parts with no names, and might rather decline the flowery bait of godly resurrections to escape the recitation of poems by Longfellow.
The teacher was prepared to recite selections from that lousy, disagreeable poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” created with Algic rumors and concoctions of native teases and the double takes of trickster stories, when my brother shouted out the first lines of the introduction to the long poem, the showy oratory of wigwams and traditions.
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams …
Blue Raven chanted the next few lines of the poem with the old man, but the ironic courtesy was not mine. Their voices created a pleasant harmony outside the station, and several people paused to listen, and then dropped coins in the coffee can. I never forgot that our strict teachers at the government school required the students to memorize more than a dozen stanzas of “The Song of Hiawatha,” truly unaware, of course, the poem was not related to natives, and Hiawatha was not Ojibway, Ojibwe, nor a native Anishinaabe. The poem was a wordy potion of a single god with no time or tense. I could not bear to recite the dopey sentiments and romantic deceptions of totemic animals in the fur trade, or the cover stories for the destruction of the white pine on the White Earth Reservation. I dropped two bits in the Wigwam Coffee can and turned away.
I should answer, I should tell you,
“From the forests and prairies,
From the great lakes and the northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs …”
Hiawatha, my brother declared, would be a perfect name for a road puppet at the Bonus March. We walked around the train station, but the scenes of human misery were too much to bear with casual gestures, and we could not merely drop a coin in a hat or can.
The Capitol Limited departed late that afternoon, and the train roared slowly out of the station and through the remains of factories. Chicago was gray and desolate along the tracks. The landscape was in ruins outside the city, an industrial reservation with no glory statues or
trace of flowers, no native tease of summer in the spring, and yet a young man was fishing in a heavy dead pond near a steel mill in Gary, Indiana.
The Capitol Limited, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, from Chicago through Pittsburgh, arrived fifteen hours later at the Union Station in Washington. The train was truly elegant and expensive, and not the suitable move for the warriors of the Depression, certainly not for native veterans en route to the Bonus Expeditionary Force.
By Now was on the back roads with the wagon horse named Treaty, but most veterans traveled in boxcars and trucks, clunky cars, and others traveled with rock bottom fares, and some arrived on motorcycles or walked. We could hardly refuse the surprise gift of tickets for a sleeping car, and with sheets, curtains, and overnight services, provided by our friend John Leecy. He once hired my brother and me to work in the stable of the hotel, and then honored us as veterans with a banquet at the end of the war. He was right, we never would have paid the price of tickets on a luxury train.
The Capitol Limited clicked into the night.
The First World War came to mind with the sound of the train. The border of combat memories was never far away even a decade later, and especially that night as the steward, a veteran of the Harlem Hellfighters, seated us in the formal dining car. Henri, his train name, reminded me of the war because he wore a miniature Croix de Guerre on his white coat, a distinctive narrow ribbon of six wide green bars on a red background, the French military decoration for gallantry.
Henri was poised for service, precise, and courteous, the perfect steward of social status, and with a massive and toothy smile. He winked in silence when we noticed the medal and broached the war. No doubt he worried about four natives in the formal dining car, but we promised only the ironic war stories of cootie graves, pinard, singe, or monkey meat, not the bloody scenes, and we praised the courage and merit of the mighty Harlem Hellfighters in the Battle of the Argonne Forest. Henri told us later that he chose his train name to honor Sergeant Henry Johnson, who served with the Hellfighters and was decorated for bravery as a combat infantry soldier with the French Fourth Army. Henry was abandoned as a decorated veteran with many wounds, and he returned as a Red Cap at the train station in Albany, New York. He died alone ten years after the end of the war.
Native Tributes Page 3
