The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  He’s grateful for his knowledge of the traditions and for the opportunity to serve. “I think one of the things that helps us is the reflection and living by a proscribed set of core cultural values. The daily engagement we have with our natural environment—the land is so sacred and having the privilege and responsibility to care for our land is so critical. We didn’t have to relocate. We didn’t have to move anywhere. We stood our ground to maintain connection to our ancestral base. I think some of the elders would say this is because we had this connection to, and reciprocal protection from, the land.” Indians fought the government plan after plan, policy after policy, legislative act after legislative act, and they continued to fight. And they fought using their own governments, their own sensibilities, origin stories, legends, language, and creativity. And they fought to remain Indian just as much as they fought for and in order to be Americans, but Americans on their own terms.

  War and Migration

  On June 13, 1942, a representative of the Iroquois Confederacy, in full regalia, stood on the steps of the United States Capitol and read a statement to the assembled statesmen and reporters:

  We represent the oldest, though smallest, democracy in the world today. It is the unanimous sentiment among Indian people that the atrocities of the Axis nations are violently repulsive to all sense of righteousness of our people, and that this merciless slaughter of mankind can no longer be tolerated. Now we do resolve that it is the sentiment of this council that the Six Nations of Indians declare that a state of war exists between our Confederacy of Six Nations on the one part and Germany, Italy, Japan and their allies against whom the United States has declared war, on the other part.

  The United States had already declared war on the Axis powers six months earlier, on December 11, 1941. Now the Iroquois Confederacy itself declared war. The member tribes of the Confederacy were fierce as enemies and even as allies: when the United States extended citizenship to all tribal people, the Iroquois Confederacy refused the gift by sending a note to the government stating that they “were not, had never been, and didn’t intend to become U.S. citizens.” (It should be noted that no peace had been made between Germany and the Iroquois Confederacy in 1918, and so the Confederacy was still, technically, at war with Germany and now simply added Italy and Japan to the list.)

  By 1944, more than a third of the Indian adult male population had served in the war. They served in every branch of the military and fought in every theater. Many were drafted (though some, in states where they still didn’t have the right to vote, resisted), and many more volunteered for service. In 1940, the median household income on reservations was $500 a year. By comparison, the median income that year for a white man (not for a household) was $956. There were few jobs, and those available to Indians were, typically, manual labor: farming, herding, and cutting wood. Despite the efforts of people like John Collier, who thought Indians should serve in segregated units, Indians were integrated into regular units. Back home, Indian women, like many other American women, joined the workforce as factory laborers and took over the majority of the harvest. My mother’s mother worked in a plant near Austin, Minnesota, turning cherries into maraschino cherries.

  Some have called the exodus of Indians into the workforce and the fighting forces the first massive migration of Indians in America. It wasn’t. Indians, as we have seen, had been moving and shifting, migrating, forming and re-forming as far back as the archaeological record can show. Not long before the war, during the Dust Bowl era and the Great Depression, many thousands of Indians from Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico had fled to California along with others fleeing the drought and the “worst hard time.” Likewise, in the 1930s, Indians in rural areas were often hired as part of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and migrated that way.

  Still, the war was transformative, and it raised Indians’ visibility in the American landscape. Among the most famous group of American Indians to serve in World War II were the Navajo code talkers, though even they had analogs and antecedents. Nineteen Choctaw had transmitted messages about troop movements and dispositions, attacks and counterattacks during the waning days of World War I. They were so successful—and the Choctaw language so hard to decipher (especially with their use of euphemisms and neologisms for terms that didn’t exist in their language, like “artillery” and “tank”)—that between the wars Hitler sent teams of anthropologists to the United States to study American Indian languages. He didn’t want Native codes to be used so effectively in what he was, rightly, sure would be the next world war.

  In 1941, twenty-seven Meskwaki from Iowa joined up together and served in North Africa. The Meskwaki, often known as “Sac and Fox” in the historical record, emerged as a people on the Saint Lawrence River, where their numbers made them a force to be reckoned with in the early part of the seventeenth century. However, punishing wars with the Huron and the Iroquois Confederacy over trade routes and relations decimated the tribe, and they migrated west to present-day Wisconsin, settling in the Fox River area. They experienced a rebirth there, on the western edge of the Great Lakes. They had settled in a geographically advantageous area—the watershed of the Fox River, which connected, through tributaries and short portages, the Great Lakes with the Mississippi. And since the Fox controlled this area, they effectively controlled a large portion of the burgeoning fur trade. As a result, they fought a series of wars with the French (who, with other Indian allies, wanted the Meskwaki out of the region) that stretched over twenty years and, combined with disease, reduced the Meskwaki from more than seven thousand members to fewer than a thousand. But they remained in Wisconsin until 1830, when Andrew Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress. Though the act was designed to remove the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States, it was also used to extinguish title and remove and relocate many tribes around the Great Lakes, including the Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, and others.

  Once again the Meskwaki were forced from their homelands, once again they were pushed farther west, this time to Kansas and Oklahoma. Some bands moved to their new homelands and made the best of it. Others stayed. In 1856, a small group of Meskwaki who had remained in Iowa got permission from the Iowa state legislature to buy land in Tama County, despite the fact that they already had title to it and had basically been usurped. In 1857 they purchased eighty acres from the government and made their settlement there. The federal government wasn’t happy with this outcome and withheld annuities and other treaty obligations from the Meskwaki for a decade in order to get them to move, but they refused. They survived on a meager corn harvest, acorns, and deer. For the next thirty years they existed in a kind of policy and legislative limbo, more or less ignored by the federal government. In some ways this was good for the Meskwaki—they organized their community as they saw fit. They didn’t suffer under the withered and withering hand of an Indian agent. They ran their own schools. They completely administered their own affairs. (To this day the roads and streets on the reservation and in the settlement aren’t paved, for spiritual reasons. The bumpy washboard roads are a reminder that you are indeed on Indian land.)

  So in 1941, when twenty-seven Meskwaki joined up to fight the Axis together, it was not the result of a long period of acculturation or even of defeat, or an attempt at mainstreaming themselves. What is staggering is that these twenty-seven constituted 16 percent of the population of Meskwaki. They all served in North Africa, and eight of them used their hard-won Meskwaki language to befuddle their enemies.

  Perhaps the most famous Indian to serve in World War II was Ira Hayes. Hayes was a Pima Indian from Sacaton, Arizona. Born in 1923, he was the oldest of six children. He wasn’t really known for anything other than being shy—both in grade school in Sacaton and later in high school at the Phoenix Indian School. He didn’t chase girls or like being chased by them. He kept to himself. Except after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, when he told a classmate that he wanted to joi
n the Marine Corps. For some reason, he waited. He finished out the year at the Phoenix Indian School and then worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps in the spring and summer before enlisting in late August 1942.

  At Camp Gillespie near San Diego, Hayes volunteered for the Marine paratrooper program and was accepted, earning his jump wings on November 30, 1942. After that he was shipped overseas; he was sent to New Caledonia and then to Vella Lavella in the Solomon Islands before he saw action at Bougainville in December 1943. He was a BAR (Browning automatic rifle) man with Company K. After that first engagement he went back to the States, was refitted and shuffled, and sent back to the Pacific with the Fifth Marine Division, tasked with dislodging the Japanese from Iwo Jima. He landed on the island on February 19, 1945, on the southern shore near Mount Suribachi. After four days of fierce fighting, Marines from Third Platoon Easy Company captured the summit of the mountain and raised a small American flag there.

  The next day Sergeant Michael Strank was ordered to pick three men from his platoon and to fly a bigger flag from the summit after they had dropped off supplies there. He took Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and Ira Hayes. Rene Gagnon, a battalion runner, brought the larger flag, and after they scavenged a bigger flagpole, the five of them, along with Harold Schultz, raised the flag over Iwo Jima. Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press captured the moment in what would become the most famous photo of the war.

  After the flag was raised Hayes spent another month and a half fighting the Japanese who remained on the island. By the time he left with his unit at the end of March, he was one of only five remaining out of the forty-five members of his platoon: the rest had been killed. The photo made Hayes famous. In the spring of 1945 he toured the United States, raising money for war bonds. Then he rejoined his unit and was sent back to the Pacific, where he was part of the occupying force in Japan until he was honorably discharged in December.

  The after-war years must have been confusing and complicated for Hayes. He was arrested fifty-two times for public drunkenness. He was unable to hold down a steady job. He once said, “I was sick. . . . I guess I was about to crack up thinking about all my good buddies. They were better men than me and they’re not coming back. Much less back to the White House [for war honor ceremonies], like me.” That was about as close as he came to naming his ghosts. Later, in 1954, at the dedication of the Marine Corps War Memorial, a reporter asked him how he liked all the “pomp and circumstance.” All Hayes said was, “I don’t.” He was found dead near his home in Arizona on January 24, 1955. Cause of death: exposure and alcohol poisoning.

  Just as the second flag-raising over Mount Suribachi became emblematic of the war as a whole, so, too, did Hayes’s life become symbolic for many Americans of the “plight” of modern Indians. They tried to read the entire history of American Indians into it: proud peoples who had been mistreated by a government they nevertheless protected and served as warriors, only to return to reservations where they and their service were forgotten by everyone except the warriors themselves, who couldn’t forget.

  Who knows? Most servicemen and women fell somewhere in between the experiences of the code talkers and soldiers like Ira Hayes. My grandfather, for instance.

  Eugene W. Seelye spent his entire life in the village where he grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota—with the exception of the two years and eight months he spent in the United States Army. In total he spent fifteen months overseas, in England, France, Belgium, and Germany. Growing up, I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t know about the war or his part in it, what he thought about it or what he felt. He was, at least to me, frightening, angry, and sharp-tongued. By the time I was born in 1970 he spent most of his time in his easy chair by the window smoking Pall Malls, nursing a kind of acidic rage. Once my uncles, knowing he had money, lined up in front of him, and the youngest, Davey, asked him for five dollars. He looked at Davey and then at his other sons and then simply said, “You think I’m fucking stupid?”

  He didn’t talk about the war, though hanging from some kind of knickknack shelf in the corner were ribbons on which were stitched the words “Normandy” and “France.” His uniform, with the Indianhead star of the Second Infantry Division, hung in the closet behind his chair. I got up the courage to ask him about the war, once, when I was in high school. All he said was, “The worst time of my life. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” The war sat in the background, as he did, with life swirling around it and him, mute on the subject of feelings other than anger and misery.

  In 1998, I went to France to promote my first novel. On my return, jet-lagged but still euphoric, I stopped in at Teal’s Super Valu in Cass Lake, the seat of the reservation. I saw my grandfather standing at the deli counter ordering pork chops and potato salad. Hey Gramps, I said. Hey boy, he said in that way of his. Where you been? I told him I had been in France, in Paris and Saint-Malo. I explained that Saint-Malo was in Brittany, but he interrupted me to tell me he knew exactly where that was.

  That was the beginning of a shift, some kind of recalibration I didn’t understand. I said, So you were in Normandy. You bet, boy, he said. June seventh, I imagine. Maybe later? I asked. June sixth, nineteen forty-four, he said, vehemently. I said, Maybe we should go to my mom’s house, cook up those pork chops. And, to my surprise, he agreed.

  My mother sized up the situation quickly. She stood at the counter prepping dinner, standing purposely outside the conversation, as if anything she might say would end it. It was as if someone had cast a spell of volubility over her father. On he went about Belgium. The trees, the countryside. The ways the peasants (in his words) cleaned the forests of sticks and blow-downs and how the whole forest felt manicured, unlike the tangle of our northern pine and poplar forest. How he had his shoes resoled in Vielsalm. How, while bivouacked in the same village, he befriended a red-haired kid. How he carved his name in a tree near the château where they were camped. How he was wounded near Aachen, just over the border with Germany. He stayed long into the evening, even though his eyes bothered him and it was hard for him to drive after dark. He wondered, with real longing, if the tree where he carved his name was still standing. I told him I would go back to France and find my way to Belgium, find Vielsalm, find the château, find the tree. I don’t think he believed me. But months later I did go back, with the map of the village he’d drawn from memory.

  Vielsalm is a village on the Salm River near the German border. The Allies and the Germans traded the town back and forth a few times before the Germans were pushed back in January 1945 and then pushed farther and farther into the ruins of the Fatherland. It’s not big, but the Ardennes is wild country—steep wooded ravines, small fast-flowing streams and rivers. The land is folded, crumpled in on itself. I imagined there would be one château in Vielsalm. There were at least a dozen. With the help of the man who owned the motel where I was staying, I found a likely place: the hunting retreat of Baron Vanderhaege, who, according to his grandson, fought the war in exile in England. I returned home, not sure I’d seen anything other than beautiful country. My grandfather called me the day I returned and every day after that while the pictures were being developed, and when they finally were ready he came over without even calling first. He sat at my table and paged through the photos. He pointed to one. That’s it. That’s the one. I thought maybe he was simply hoping, that there was a pleasant lie in the act of stabbing his finger into the frame. When you face the building, there was a door on the right, in kind of a tower thing, he said. That’s the door I used. My heart fell. There had been no door. No tower. Nothing like that. He was wrong. Or more like: he wanted to recognize the place more than he wanted to be right. He flipped two more pictures. See, boy. See? There’s that door. I looked, and sure enough: covered by ivy, obscured by some hedges, there was a round stone outcropping on the building, and set in the stone was a small green door.

  I was almost thirty when I went to France. But it was as thou
gh I’d just become my grandfather’s grandson then.

  We became close. I wasn’t the only one in the family curious about him, or the war, or even just his time on earth. My cousins were. His children were, too. But maybe it was just that I had walked where he fought. I had slept where he’d been sleepless. I’d seen that other place. He shared his war stories. But I was not smart enough, not a good enough listener then to be able to distinguish between a war story and a combat story. A Marine veteran of Vietnam made the distinction clear to me many years later: Combat stories, stories about fighting, of shooting and getting shot are one thing. Those are combat stories. War stories are different. I knew a guy who was in Vietnam, and he told me nothing happened to him. He didn’t fight. He wasn’t in country. He said he had nothing to say about the war. I asked him what he did and he said, “I worked for Graves Registration. I got all the bodies ready before they flew them back to the States.” Now that guy? He had a war story. He saw and touched and moved all those bodies. That was war.

  My grandfather shared war stories but not combat stories. He didn’t talk at all about Normandy except to say that he saw guys drowning and he would rather get shot than drown. And that nothing saved him except luck. About the Ardennes he said only that they learned to hug trees because the Germans would fire tree bursts—shells aimed at treetop level, sending splinters down in all directions. The safest place to avoid those was directly under a tree. He did say that he hadn’t been shot. Rather, while he was on patrol, just over the German border, one of the men in his patrol stepped on a mine. It blew off the man’s legs and sent a shard of shrapnel through my grandfather’s shoulder. He remarked how surprised he was to see this man, last name Van Winkle, in a hospital near Seattle after the war. He mentioned how he was attached to the 101st Airborne during the Battle of the Bulge. But mostly he talked about the land and the weather and the buildings and the forests and the people. He mentioned how the army had wanted him to be a sniper but he was too scared to be tied into a tree. How he was tasked to be a truck driver but never once got a truck to drive and so he walked and fought the whole way through France and Belgium. These were the stories he told until he shot himself in the head in 2007, just after his eighty-third birthday.