The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  It was into this kettle of death—living belowground in muddy trenches, deprived of light and food, pestered by rats and the oozy stench of the rotting bodies of the combatants who died before them, suffering from trench foot and dysentery, subjected to mustard gas attacks, bombardment, and snipers—that Indian soldiers descended in 1918 as part of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Upon landing, the Americans were tasked with destroying German positions in France at the Amiens salient north of Paris, German positions at the Marne, and the Saint-Mihiel salient near Verdun. Indians fought in all these engagements. Among them were Sergeant Otis W. Leader, a Choctaw machine gunner in the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment. Before the war, Leader had been accused of spying for the Germans, and in an effort to clear his name he’d joined the infantry. Leader went on to fight at Soissons, Château-Thierry, Saint-Mihiel, and in the Argonne Forest. Before he was done, he’d been wounded and gassed twice. Sergeant Thomas Rogers, Arikara, and Joe Young Hawk, Lakota, also fought at Soissons. Rogers was an incredible soldier and was cited for bravery after he captured “at night barehanded and alone, many [German] sentinels who were taken back to the American camp for questioning.” During the same battle, Young Hawk was captured by the Germans while on patrol. He turned on his captors and killed three with his bare hands. During the fray he was shot through both legs but nonetheless managed to capture two more Germans and march them back to American lines.

  Tales of Indian heroism abounded and fed the stereotype of the “Indian brave” who was inured to death and pain. Firsthand testimony suggests the stereotypes might have been, at least in part, true. After a young Creek officer was killed while on patrol near Château-Thierry, his company commander wrote that “Lieutenant Breeding had the distinction of being the most capable, daring, and fearless platoon leader in the division.” Sergeant John Northrup, Ojibwe from Fond du Lac Reservation in Minnesota, had his leg blown off in the fighting around the Ourcq River. While he waited for evacuation he “saw another Indian soldier crawling in on his hands and knees under heavy German machine-gun fire. On the Indian’s back was a badly wounded soldier. As the Native American passed by, Northrup noticed both the Indian’s feet had been shot off.” Major Tom Riley, the commander of the Third Battalion, 165th Infantry Division, observed, “If a battle was on, and you wanted to find the Indians, you would always find them at the front.” In a particularly brutal fight during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, 476 of the 876 men in Riley’s battalion were killed. He noted that the “Indians in the front ranks were thoroughly swept away. When an Indian went down, another Indian immediately stepped to the front.”

  These incidences of heroism may have had as much to do with army protocol as they did with any cultural or genetic predisposition to bravery. As part of the induction process, recruits were administered “intelligence” tests that included questions such as: “Bull Durham is the name of a A. chewing gum, B. aluminum ware, C. tobacco, D. clothing.” “Seven-up is played with A. rackets, B. cards, C. pins, D. dice.” “The most prominent industry of Minneapolis is A. flour, B. packing, C. automobiles, D. brewing.” The answers to such dubious questions could determine where and in what capacity men served, and the army generally attempted to preserve “intelligence” by placing those who scored high on the test in less dangerous assignments, while those with lower scores were often assigned to infantry units. As a result, men from inner-city slums, Appalachia, the Deep South, and Indian reservations—men, that is, often without access to money, education, or social mobility—wound up in the infantry. For Indians in service, the results were disastrous: they disproportionately served as scouts and snipers and patrol leaders, “you would always find them at the front” because the army put them there, and they suffered casualty rates five times higher than the American Expeditionary Force as a whole. Yet they served in mixed regiments and battalions, a circumstance that was to ripple out in unforeseen ways through the years.

  As with almost everything Indian, the question of whether to segregate Indians was attended by fierce ideological battles. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. By the end of the month, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that called for the formation 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.” One of the provisions of the bill was that Indians who served in these regiments would be granted citizenship at war’s end without jeopardizing their tribal status.

  The principal advocate for segregated units was Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon, the author of The Vanishing Race. Who exactly Dixon was remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. He was born in Pennsylvania, attended the Rochester Theological Seminary, and then more or less disappeared for thirty years. He resurfaced in the early part of the twentieth century as a self-appointed (and celebrated) “author, explorer, ethnologist and authority on the American Indian.” He managed to team up with Rodman Wanamaker, scion of the Wanamaker department store family, who began funding expeditions into Indian country with the ostensible mission of saving the last vestiges of a “vanishing race.” The first such expedition brought Dixon and a film crew to Crow Agency, where in 1908 he filmed Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha using Crow Indian “braves” and “maidens.” What filming a New England poet’s confabulation of Ojibwe and Iroquois myths had to do with actually helping Indians is unclear, but Wanamaker was happy with the film and funded a lecture circuit that had Dixon making more than three hundred appearances before more than four hundred thousand people.

  Dixon returned to Montana on a second “Wanamaker Expedition.” This time his mission to capture the vanishing race was more solid. He handpicked twenty-one chiefs from eleven different bands and then (ignoring the fact that more than 250,000 Indians belonging to more than three hundred different tribes then existed in the country) claimed that they represented “nearly every Indian tribe in the United States.” This orchestrated “last great council of the chiefs,” Dixon claimed, “had for its dominant idea the welfare of the Indian, that he should live at peace with his fellows and all men.” As such, “the council became not only a place of historic record but a school for the inculcation of the highest ideals of peace” before Indians were interred in “the grave of their race.”

  As it happened, one of the “chiefs,” Runs-the-Enemy, was a tribal policeman. Another, White Horse, was a farmer and a missionary at the Yankton Sioux Agency. And another, unnamed, had been appointed by the Indian agent to appear in the film and was anxious to get back to his fields so he could put up his hay before the fall rains. But in Dixon’s thinking, the Indian and his ways were doomed to extinction. He “would not yield. He died. He would not receive his salvation by surrender; rather would he choose oblivion, unknown darkness—the melting fires of extermination.” Looking back on the council, he mused sadly, “For one splendid moment they were once again real Indians.” Being a “real Indian,” to him at least, meant fading into the twilight of the past. The Vanishing Race and the accompanying photos and book were a fabulous success.

  Lest he be outdone, after the second expedition, Dixon helped create a national memorial dedicated to the “Vanishing Indian”; at the inauguration, many real live Indians showed up. Then the third, most extravagant expedition was launched in 1913. Called the “Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship,” it was a mammoth undertaking. Dixon assembled a team of photographers and ethnographers and had Wanamaker outfit a special train, the Signet, to carry them on a twenty-thousand-mile odyssey through Indian America, stopping at every major reservation. At each they instructed the Indian agent to have assembled as many Indians as possible in their regalia around a temporary flagpole. Dixon would then raise the American flag as the Indians signed a pledge of fealty to the United States, symbolically ushering them into modern America from their ravaged and soon-to-die tribal past. The assembled Indians were also treated to a recorded message from President Woodrow Wilson, played back on a phonograph:
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  There are some dark pages in the history of the white man’s dealings with the Indian, and many parts of the record are stained with greed and avarice of those who have thought only of their own profit; but it is also true that the purposes and motives of this great Government and of our nation as a whole toward the red man have been wise, just and beneficent. . . . The Great White Father now calls you his “brothers,” not his “children.” Because you have shown in your education and in your settled ways of life staunch, manly, worthy qualities of sound character, the nation is about to give you distinguished recognition through the erection of a monument in honor of the Indian people, in the harbor of New York. The erection of that monument will usher in that day which Thomas Jefferson said he would rejoice to see, “when the Red Men become truly one people with us, enjoying all the rights and privileges we do, and living in peace and plenty.” I rejoice to foresee the day.

  The message and the narrative were clear. The story of the Indian was now the story of the death of the tribe and the continued life of the man. Assimilation was, to people like Dixon and Wanamaker—if not to the Indians themselves—the answer to the problem of continued Indian existence. But the ideology was complicated by the aesthetics that surrounded it: if Indians were to be assimilated, why parade them in regalia at the moment of their passing? If assimilation was the answer, why then elide the ways in which Indians (like the ones who posed as chiefs for Dixon at Crow Agency) were finding ways to live?

  This moral and aesthetic confusion found its way into the debates surrounding citizenship and military service. Guided more by his romantic feelings about Indians than by the record of Indians in military service—which they had been a part of since well before the Civil War—Dixon lobbied forcefully for all-Indian regiments, maintaining that the “Indian spirit would be crushed if we insist that he take his stand beside the white man.” Yet in the age of American triumphalism, how else to consider assimilation? And if assimilation was to be the watchword, wouldn’t that be better achieved by integration into regular regiments? That’s what top-ranking military officials felt, and they were backed up by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells, who wrote that the “military segregation of the Indian is altogether objectionable. It does not afford the associational contact he needs and is unfavorable to his preparation for citizenship. . . . [The] mingling of the Indian with the white soldier ought to have, as I believe it will, a large influence in moving him away from tribal relations and toward civilization.”

  Tribal opinion itself was mixed. Some tribes—the Crow, Lakota, and others—wrote letters urging Congress to allow them to form all-Indian regiments. Others, like Red Cliff Reservation in Wisconsin, were glad that they were able to serve with their white neighbors. In the end, the army won that fight, and while there were some all-Indian regiments, most Indians served alongside their white counterparts. Both camps—the preservationists and the assimilationists—had the same goal and operated from the same understanding: that the old tribal ways were dead and the Indian problem would die only if tribes died.

  And yet.

  And yet, in the army as at boarding school, Indians did pick up skills. They became literate and learned trades. Many converted to Christianity, but many didn’t. They learned how to work within (and for) organizational structures, as bookkeepers, secretaries, teamsters, cooks, drivers, and triggermen; they built ships and baked bread and went on patrol. They did this as servicemen and as Indians. And when the war was over, they more often than not returned home. They returned changed. And they returned to a shock. Veterans arriving in White Earth Reservation in Minnesota described the land as like that of Flanders and Soissons: ravaged and bare, but not by bombs. Rather, allotments and leases had been gobbled up by timber barons and the land had been clear-cut. Minneapolis had become a national center for prostheses because it had access to the straight-grained, strong, knot-free virgin white pine that was best for making them. The timber was largely cut from trees illegally (and immorally) harvested on White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Lake Reservations.

  Despite the clamoring of romantics like Dixon and others like him who sought to “help” the Indian and saw military service as a path to citizenship, at war’s end fewer than half of the Indian population were citizens, and even fewer had the right to vote. Not even all the men and women who served gained citizenship. The United States, well on its way to becoming a world power, was keen to congratulate itself, and so, even as it treated its veterans shamefully and bungled its treaty obligations, it did hand out a lot of medals and flags to Indian communities around the country. Felix Renvielle, a veteran of the Argonne Forest who had wounds so critical his parents had been sent a death certificate, suffered for the rest of his life at Sisseton in South Dakota, without access to adequate medical care. Theodore D. Beaulieu, Ojibwe from White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, wrote that the Ojibwe, having served in the war, nevertheless were subject to an “undemocratic bureaucracy, . . . compelled to pay double taxation [and] denied the privilege of work or suggestion as to the manner of the disposition of their tribal funds” and that his people struggled “against want, hunger, and disease.” Joseph Oklahombi, who returned to Oklahoma the most decorated American Indian hero of the war, remained illiterate and found work loading lumber at a mill and coal company, but that didn’t last long. He turned to booze and by 1932 was surviving on his veteran’s pension of twelve dollars a month. He was struck and killed by a car while walking along the road on April 13, 1960.

  But not all veterans lived—or died—alone. Navajo, Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina, and Lakota on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota established American Legion posts. Other Indians quietly parlayed their war experience into spiritual and political leadership positions within their tribes.

  The men who returned, returned having seen the world. They were the first generation of Indian people who could begin to see America from outside both the American and the Indian lens. They had been to Brest, Paris, London, Lille. And—disillusioned, war-weary, and bereft—they might have seen something policy makers and fantasists like Dixon could not. Faced with acculturation at the bottom or building a new Indian polity where they would have some say in what happened to them, the choice must have been clear. So it was not surprising that at the close of the First World War, Indian men and women began building new kinds of Indian communities and governments. And for the first time, they were armed with the tools of the modern nation-state.

  A mere twenty-eight years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, American Indians had helped to perpetuate global violence and proved that they were good at it, but something else was happening, too, something that escaped notice at the time. By 1917, for the first time in more than a hundred years, American Indian births outstripped Indian deaths. Our population was on the rise.

  Asked what should be done to the kaiser after the war was over (and reflecting on the service of his own people and their subsequent treatment), an elderly Lakota man responded that the German leader should be “confined to a reservation, given an allotment, and forced to farm. When the kaiser asked for help, the old man continued, the Indian agent should say to him, ‘Now you lazy bad man, you farm and make your living by farming, rain or no rain; and if you do not make your own living don’t come to the Agency whining when you have no food in your stomach and no money, but stay here on your farm and grow fat till you starve.’”

  Still, after the end of the Indian Wars, after allotment, after boarding schools, and after World War I, history was in many ways something that happened to Indians, not something they made. Or if they made it, it was (in the words of Karl Marx) not with tools of their own choosing. The path to citizenship was no exception. While citizenship was the logical extension of assimilation, it didn’t happen in any kind of uniform way. The service of Indian veterans in World War I certainly played a role in the quest for citizenship, but Indians had served with and for the United States in every single
armed conflict it had fought, beginning with the Revolutionary War, not to mention against other tribes and sometimes even against their own. Despite their service, until World War I, Indians had been excluded from the citizenship clauses in the U.S. Constitution and, again, in the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868.

  While some Indians had gained citizenship, either through the fee-simple patenting provisions included in the Dawes and Curtis Acts, by renouncing tribal membership in order to own land outright, or by marrying U.S. citizens (this worked for women only, not men), there was a push after the war to extend citizenship to all Indians born in the United States. Once again, the push came from everyone except themselves. The Friends of the Indian and the Indian Rights Association lobbied heavily. Dixon, whose floridity never failed to eclipse the people he believed he was serving, wrote, “The Indian, though a man without a country, the Indian who has suffered a thousand wrongs considered the white man’s burden and from mountains, plains and divides, the Indian threw himself into the struggle to help throttle the unthinkable tyranny of the Hun. The Indian helped to free Belgium, helped to free all the small nations, helped to give victory to the Stars and Stripes. The Indian went to France to help avenge the ravages of autocracy. Now, shall we not redeem ourselves by redeeming all the tribes?”