The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Sam was living in our ancestral village of Bena at the time. Leech Lake Reservation is a big reservation, about forty by forty miles. Within the reservation boundaries, there are a number of towns and villages tucked here and there among the swamps, rivers, lakes, and pine trees. Some of the communities are exclusively Indian, like Inger and Ball Club, some are almost all white, and some, like Bena, are mixed. Bena used to be a going concern—it was the end of the line during logging days, and all sorts of timber outfits would get the train as far as Bena and then head north to their logging camps. In the early part of the twentieth century it boasted a number of hotels, stores, and restaurants. After most of the virgin white pine and pulp was cut down in northern Minnesota, Bena managed to stay alive thanks to the growing tourist trade. As roads got better, boats sturdier, and Americans wealthier, they traveled farther and farther north in search of good fishing. Situated on the southern shore of Lake Winnibigoshish, Bena became a fishing destination. But the lake crashed eventually, and Bena—sometimes swelling to a population in the high hundreds during the summer—got smaller and smaller. Today it has a population of around 118, one gas station, a bar, and a post office. The hotels, hardware stores, restaurants, the school—all of it is gone. What have remained, however, are a few big families descended from the mix of Ojibwe Indians and Scots, English, and Irish who came to cut trees and later to take people fishing on the beautiful waters of Lake Winnie. Seelyes and Matthewses and Lyons and Tibbettses and Dunhams and Michauds and Dormans and Drews still live there.

  As much as Sam was drawn back to the reservation and to Bena out of loneliness and affection, and despite the seemingly unbreakable bonds the village exerts on those of us whose families are from there, it’s a place that can encourage destruction and dysfunction. To be from Bena was in some fundamental way to be tough. If people found out they’d be fighting a Bena boy, often they’d take a pass. Oh, remembered my mother, every Saturday was fight night. Bena against Federal Dam. Bena against Boy River. Bena against Ball Club. Everyone would get together and rumble and that’s what they’d talk about all week. That was back in the 1950s, but in some ways it’s still true.

  I didn’t fit the tough mold, but Sam did. He fought at bars. He fought at house parties. He literally fought in the street. “No one could beat me, for some reason. I had a good wrestling base. I was strong. I could punch guys out and if I couldn’t punch them out I just took them down to the ground.”

  Sam also drank a lot. His mother, my aunt Barb, who—like Sam—had done really well for a long time, began to slide after Vanessa’s death. Sober for years, she began drinking and using drugs again. A host of health problems ensued. There was nothing Sam could do except fight, and that’s what he did. Fighting and partying led to drugs and crime. This life went on for years. It’s a wonder he didn’t die. But Sam has always had stamina.

  “We were involved in a little drug ring, I guess you could say,” Sam recalls. A rival group, not exactly a gang, were dealing drugs around Bemidji, skinheads, and they ripped off the guys Sam was with. So Sam and his friends went to the trailer where they were staying, and he kicked down the door. “We lit them up. There were three of us against six of them. A couple of our guys brought guns, and these other guys had guns, too. But I just walked up and starting laying guys out. I turned it into a fistfight. One after another I took those guys out. I got a year for aggravated assault but ended up sitting for eight months. That was a real low point for me. I guess I fell in the wrong ruts, and I couldn’t get out of them. Just for the record, it was my own choice. I could have done what my dad wanted me to do, but I didn’t. I chose the wrong path, and there I was, sitting in prison.” If the army had made Sam feel far from home, prison felt a lot farther.

  I didn’t see Sam much in the years before he got sent to prison. I missed him. I missed the old him I’d known when we were kids—cheerful, funny, ready to laugh at everyone else’s jokes. But that cousin was gone. He grew angry and violent, and I wasn’t sure how to tease him anymore. And then came prison.

  “So when I got out, I got out on the right foot. I didn’t go back to Bena.” He went to live with a friend “down by the Cities. I didn’t go back to Bena. I changed somehow.” He was working hard, living away from the reservation, and around that time, in 2000, he heard about MMA on the radio. This was, for Sam, a kind of answer. It might, it just might, offer some structure for the fight in him, which was, by this point, as much a part of him as breathing.

  * * *

  —

  OUR TRIBE, the Ojibwe, are not known for being warlike. Until the late seventeenth century we lacked any real sort of tribal identity and didn’t engage in much warfare beyond small skirmishes. Loose bands, based on marriage and clan, moved seasonally between beds of wild rice, fishing grounds, and sugar bush. Hunger, more than other men, was the enemy, and battles were small and relatively rare. However, as the demand for furs increased in the East and overseas, the Ojibwe around the Great Lakes were perfectly positioned to take full advantage of it. They acted as middlemen—securing furs from the West and selling them to the East in exchange for guns and ammunition and cloth—and grew powerful in that role. Their land base grew by a factor of twenty, infant mortality went down, the standard of living went up, and the small Ojibwe bands joined together into a vast, complicated, calculating tribe that effectively controlled a major part of the fur trade.

  The tribe was born out of trade, and it came of age in blood, not on horseback out on the Plains, but on foot and by canoe, in the deep woods and scattered watersheds of Wisconsin and Minnesota. In an effort to expand their territory and therefore their security, the Ojibwe began battling the Dakota, on and off. Life was war, and anyone who belonged to an enemy band was a legitimate target: men, women, children. All were killed, all were scalped. (Once, in order to show their disdain, a victorious party of Dakota refused to scalp the Ojibwe corpses; the Ojibwe, upon finding their dead untouched, flew into a rage.) In April 1850, a party of Dakota attacked an Ojibwe sugar camp near the Saint Croix River northeast of Stillwater, Minnesota. They killed and scalped fourteen Ojibwe and took a nine-year-old boy prisoner. The next day they paraded the bloody scalps and their young captive through the village of Stillwater, to the horror of the white inhabitants. The Ojibwe chief Bagone-giizhig (Hole-in-the-Day) was so incensed that during a diplomatic visit to Saint Paul the next month, he killed and scalped a Dakota man in front of his entire family in broad daylight and escaped with his entourage by canoe. He also once declared war on the Dakota and led a war party of more than two hundred against a Dakota camp of more than five hundred warriors along the Minnesota River. The night before the attack, one of the warriors said he’d had a dream it ended badly; the power of the warrior’s vision persuaded the war party to turn back. Bagone-giizhig said they were cowards and continued on with just one warrior. Together they attacked the camp, killed one or two Dakota, and fled back north.

  Bagone-giizhig was only one Ojibwe war chief famous for his daring if not his violence. Curly Head, Loon’s Foot, Bad Boy, Flat Mouth, White Cloud—they were all fighters. But perhaps the most impressive Ojibwe warrior was Waabojiig, White Fisher. As near as anyone can figure, he was born in 1747 and showed courage and a warrior’s sensibilities at a young age. During a battle with the Dakota, Waabojiig’s father, Mangizid, called a cease-fire when he saw that among his opponents was his half brother, the Dakota chief Wabasha. Mangizid invited his brother into his lodge, and Waabojiig, who was only eight but had been taught from an early age that the Dakota were the enemy, hid behind the door flap and, as Wabasha stooped to enter, hit him over the head with a war club. Wabasha rubbed his head, looked down at Waabojiig, and told him, laughing, My nephew! You’re a brave one and I’m sure you’ll go on to kill many of the enemy someday. His uncle was right. By the time Waabojiig was in his early twenties, he was already a war chief, six-foot-six and with “a commanding countenance, united to ease and dignity of
manners,” according to an eyewitness. In one summer’s campaign down the Saint Croix valley against the Dakota he killed seventy-three of the enemy, most of them with his war club.

  But what to do when the fighting is over—after the Ojibwe and our enemies became friends, and after open hostilities between the U.S. government and the tribes ended at the close of the Plains Wars? What to do after the reservation period began and the martial spirit that had largely ensured our survival became an accessory to everyday life rather than its guarantor? In 1917—as tribal power and polity were being eroded by the Dawes Act, the Burke Amendment, the Curtis Act, the Court and Code of Indian Offenses; as power was being stripped from tribes and individual Indians in the 1880s and through the turn of the century; as Indian families endured assault after assault on their autonomy and collectivity; as Indian homelands were being bled of acreage and Indian families were being gutted—Indian men, in proportions far higher than any other ethnic or racial group, began signing up to serve in the Allied Expeditionary Force.

  Indians had been serving in large numbers in Canada (as part of the Commonwealth) since 1914. The most decorated soldier (and certainly the most effective) in the Canadian Army was Francis Pegahmagabow. Pegahmagabow (Arrives Standing) was Ojibwe from Wasauksing First Nation on Parry Island in Lake Huron. Orphaned at an early age and raised by relatives on his reserve, he found work as a firefighter, then was drafted at the outbreak of World War I and deployed in France with the First Canadian Infantry Battalion, part of the First Canadian Division, itself the first batch of Canadian troops sent to fight in France. Within a few months, Pegahmagabow saw action at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, which was the first major battle in which chemical warfare saw widespread use; the Germans relied heavily on chlorine gas. And it was arguably the first major military engagement in Europe that was won by a non-European power: it was the Canadians who saved the day and drove the Germans back. When the battle ended, there were more than 120,000 casualties on all sides.

  April 24 was the worst day of fighting, with more than three thousand killed by artillery and infantry attacks along the front in the course of that single day. Pegahmagabow served throughout the entire battle, first as a scout and then as a sniper. Snipers were a relatively new addition to the apparatus of war. The term originated in British India to describe someone skilled at shooting snipe, an elusive game bird notoriously hard to shoot owing to speed and camouflage. With the addition of optic sights (scopes), sharpshooters and marksmen could more effectively kill the enemy at greater ranges and without themselves being seen. Pegahmagabow excelled at this. After Ypres, he saw action at the Somme and Passchendaele. By the time of the armistice in 1918 he had been wounded twice and was one of the most decorated Canadian soldiers in history. He was credited with 378 confirmed kills and the capture of 300 Germans.

  He had a counterpart from Oklahoma, Private Joseph Oklahombi of the Choctaw Nation. In October 1918, during the Allied offensive at Saint-Étienne, Oklahombi rushed two hundred yards across open ground and captured a German machine gun position. He turned the machine gun on the Germans, killing 79 before taking another 171 captive—and holding them so for four days until reinforcements came to his aid, even while he himself was wounded in both legs and without food or water. He was awarded the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre but was never recommended for the Medal of Honor. In comparison, twenty of the troopers who opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee had received the Medal of Honor for their efforts twenty-seven years earlier.

  In the lead-up to 1917, when America entered the war, many Indians from northern tribes in the United States, some of which straddled the border, walked or paddled across the international boundary and enlisted in the Canadian army. The Onondaga and Oneida in upstate New York went so far as to declare war on Germany. But there has never been anything like consensus between tribes as they puzzled out how and to what extent they would work with (or against) the American government. When the U.S. government required Indian men to register for the draft in World War I, not a few southern and western tribes bristled, as American Indians were not, generally, citizens at the time, except for some few thousand who had acquired citizenship through allotment. Yavapai activist Dr. Carlos Montezuma, who was strongly against the draft, wrote about it in his newspaper, Wassaja: “They are not citizens. They have fewer privileges than have foreigners. They are wards of the United States of America without their consent or the chance of protest on their part.” Not a few tribes agreed. Indian men from Deep Creek Reservation in Utah and Nevada refused to register. The Indian agent ordered their incarceration. The Goshute men armed themselves and bought ammunition. Army troops were brought in, and still the tribe refused to give up the men. The army detained more than a hundred men and arrested six of them, but they were eventually freed.

  In Oklahoma, Ellen Perryman, last in the line of a prominent Muscogee Creek family, planned a commemoration of the actions of “Loyal Creek” during the Civil War. It turned into an anti-draft protest that escalated into gunfire and the Creek Draft Rebellion of 1919, and Perryman was charged under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. She fled and eluded federal agents for months before she was arrested. Ultimately, her case was postponed indefinitely as long as she behaved herself—a quiet ending to an episode that had grown to involve the Oklahoma National Guard, state and local law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Post Office, Secret Service, and the Office of Indian Affairs.

  But Perryman was in the minority. The War Department estimated that more than seventeen thousand Indian men enlisted in World War I. Sixty-five hundred of those were drafted. The Office of Indian Affairs collected data, too, and they determined that around half of all the Indians who served volunteered. Some tribes sent very few of their men. Only 1 percent of Diné men served, while more than 40 percent of Osage and Quapaw from Oklahoma joined up. Meanwhile, many Choctaw Indians, also from Oklahoma, joined the American Expeditionary Forces and became the first “code talkers,” as the Germans were unable to break the code of the Choctaw language. All in all, Indian participation in World War I was as much as 30 percent of the adult male population, double the percentage of all adult American men who served.

  Within months of the draft, Indians could be found in every branch of the service. Most of the Ojibwe men from Red Cliff Reservation in Wisconsin were tasked to the military police. Pablo Herrera, a Pueblo student from Carlisle Indian Industrial School, ended up commanding a balloon squadron. And five Osage men from Oklahoma served in an aero squadron as pilots. A fanciful journalist suggested that “the Aviation Corps of the Army makes an appeal to the red-skinned youth as fully as to the pale-face. There is a sharp fascination to youthful imagination in learning to take to the clouds like birds of the air. And then there is a kinship with nature, too, in the religion of the genuine Indian, which makes the ability of human beings to rise and go skyward doubly alluring.” As nice as this sounds, the Osage—whose lands had been allotted in 1907, with each head of household receiving 657 acres—were by 1918 fabulously wealthy because those allotments turned out to sit on top of the largest accessible oil reserves in the United States at the time. It was said that the Osage were “the richest nation, clan or social group of any race on earth, including the whites, man for man.” Quite likely the Osage aviators were able to buy their commissions as readily as their wealthy eastern prep-school counterparts.

  The Indian boarding schools were a rich source of Indian volunteers. Hampton Institute, Carlisle, Chilocco, Haskell, and Phoenix Indian Schools all sent hundreds and eventually thousands of students off to World War I. Even many of their underage students were encouraged to enlist. Lee Rainbow (Yuma) enlisted at age fifteen and was killed within the year. Henry Tallman (Navajo) ran away from boarding school and enlisted before finishing the eighth grade. Since most of the Indian boarding schools were organized using martial principles—uniforms, marching in formation, the use of cadets, etc.—volunteers
from those schools often had an easier time adjusting to army life than their white counterparts. They were often paid more, too: their vocational training in school qualified them for positions most other draftees and volunteers couldn’t fill. Graduates of the Phoenix Indian School entered the service as carpenters’ mates, shipwrights, blacksmiths, electricians, and colliers. Most Indians, however, served in the infantry. Most, that is, were there to shoot and get shot at.

  Whatever the cauldrons of violence on their homelands from which Indian soldiers emerged, they would have seemed small, even tame, compared with the “worldwide festival of death, [the] ugly rutting fever that inflame[d] the raining evening sky all around” that they encountered on the western front in France and Belgium. After initial clashes in eastern France, the Allied and German forces repeatedly tried to outflank each other in what became known as the “race to the sea.” Beginning at the First Battle of the Marne, each force jumped north and west in an effort to maneuver around the other, but they were too evenly matched. By 1915, a mere year after the outbreak of war, the “war of movement” had devolved into an unbroken line of static trench warfare from Lorraine to the Belgian coast. The Germans, with one major exception, squatted on the territories they captured and relied on formidable defensive positions, whereas the British and French mounted offensive after offensive, launched from shallow “temporary” trenches in an effort to dislodge the Germans. The British and French suffered horribly as a result. The scale of the clashes is hard to fathom. In the ten-month Battle of Verdun the following year, the French and Germans together suffered 975,000 casualties. Farther north at the Somme, the British lost 420,000 men, the French 200,000, and the Germans 500,000 over a four-month period.