Blue Ravens: Historical Novel
Read Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Online
Authors: Gerald Vizenor
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #War & Military
B
LUE
R
AVENS
GERALD
V
IZENOR
BLUE
R
AVENS
â â â â â â â
HISTORICAL NOVEL
â â â â â â â
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
âºâºâº â¹â¹â¹
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2014 Gerald Vizenor
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed and typeset in Parkinson Electra
by Eric M. Brooks
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the
Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets
their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request
5 4 3 2 1
Front cover illustrations: Top: Rick Bartow, Raven's Dream, pastel on paper, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR. Bottom: “Supports going up after battleâ¦, photograph, c.1917. Image No. 10429058 © Kodak Collection/National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library.
âº
IN MEMORY OF IGNATIUS VIZENOR
â¹
AUGUSTUS HUDON BEAULIEU
ELLANORA BEAULIEU
JOHN CLEMENT BEAULIEU
LAWRENCE VIZENOR
Ignatius Vizenor was born May 4, 1894,
son of Michael Vizenor and Angeline Cogger,
on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. He was
a dapper dresser, wore a fedora, and fought for a nation that
once inspired natives in the fur trade. The surname Vizenor
was derived from Vezina in New France. Private Vizenor
was killed in action on October 8, 1918,
at Montbréhain, France.
Ignatius Vizenor was buried at
Saint Benedict's Catholic Cemetery on the
White Earth Reservation. The military coffin was sealed,
and no one at the funeral could account for his entire remains.
Thousands of soldiers were harrowed in the soil that
early autumn at Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne,
Ardennes, and Picardy in France.
Raven created the world for his amusement
and people were the most amusing
of all animals to him.
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
JOHN MARZLUFF, TONY ANGELL
âºâºâº â¹â¹â¹
Blue is not aggressive and violates nothing;
it reassures and draws togetherâ¦. The same is
true in many other languages:
bleu, blew, blu, blau
are reassuring and poetic words that link
color, memory, desire, and dreams.
Blue: The History of Color
MICHEL PASTOUREAU
âºâºâº â¹â¹â¹
The French early gained the utmost
confidence of the Ojibways, and thereby
they became more thoroughly acquainted
with their true and real character, even during the
comparative short season in which they mingled
with them as a nationâ¦. The French understood
their divisions into clans, and treated each clan
according to the order of its ascendency
in the tribe.
History of the Ojibway People
WILLIAM WARREN
Today a bird flew near our battery during the chaos.
It seemed stunned and no wonder when man has so
upset the order of life. What a blessing will it be
when mother nature has the running of the
universe to herself again.
The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood
EDITED BY ROBERT H. FERRELL
âºâºâº â¹â¹â¹
Houses are eviscerated like human beings
and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled
whiteness as though fallen from heaven to earth. The
very shape of the plain is changed by the frightful heaps
of wounded and slainâ¦. Turn where you will,
there is war in every corner of that vastness.
Under Fire: The Story of a Squad
HENRY BARBUSSE
âºâºâº â¹â¹â¹
Touching war memorials, and in particular, touching
the names of those who died, is an important part of
the rituals of separation ⦠thus testifying that whatever the
aesthetic and political meanings which they may bear, they
are also sites of mourning, and of gestures which
go beyond the limitations of place and time.
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning
JAY WINTER
C
ONTENTS
⺠1 â¹
R
OMAN
B
EAKS
â â â â â â â
1907
â â â â â â â
Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu created marvelous blue ravens that stormy summer. He painted blue ravens over the mission church, blue ravens in the clouds, celestial blue ravens with tousled manes perched on the crossbeams of the new telegraph poles near the post office, and two grotesque blue ravens cocked as mighty sentries on the stone gateway to the hospital on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
My brother was twelve years old when he first painted the visionary blue ravens on flimsy newsprint. Aloysius was truly an inspired artist, not a student painter. He enfolded the ethereal blue ravens in newsprint and printed his first saintly name on the corner of the creased paper.
Aloysius Beaulieu, or
beau
lieu
, means a beautiful place in French. That fur-trade surname became our union of ironic stories, necessary art, and our native liberty. Henri Matisse, we discovered later, painted the
Nu Bleu, Souvenir de Biskra
, or the
Blue Nude
, that same humid and gusty summer in France.
The blue ravens were traces of visions and original abstract totems, the chance associations of native memories in the natural world. Aloysius was teased and admired at the same time for his distinctive images of ravens.
Frances Densmore, the famous ethnomusicologist, attended the annual native celebration and must have seen the visionary totemic blue ravens that summer on the reservation. Her academic studies were more dedicated, however, to the mature traditions and practiced presentations of art and music than the inspirations of a precocious native artist.
President Theodore Roosevelt, that same year, proposed the Hague Convention. The international limitation of armaments was not sustained by the great powers because several nations united with Germany and vetoed the convention on military arms. The First World War started seven years later, and that wicked crusade would change our world forever.
Marc Chagall and my brother would be celebrated for their blue scenes
and visionary portrayals. Chagall painted blue dreams, lovers, angels, violinists, donkeys, cities, and circus scenes. He was six years older than my brother, and they both created blue visionary creatures and communal scenes. Chagall declared his vision as an artist in Vitebsk on the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia. Aloysius created his glorious blue ravens about the same time on the Pale of White Earth in Minnesota. He painted blue ravens in new reservation scenes perched over the government school, the mission, hospital, cemetery, and icehouses. Many years later he blued the bloody and desolate battlefields of the First World War in France.
Chagall and my brother were the saints of blues.
Aloysius was commended for his godly native talents and artistic portrayals by Father Aloysius Hermanutz, his namesake and the resident priest at Saint Benedict's Mission. Nonetheless the priest provided my brother with black paint to correct the primary color of the blue ravens. The priest was constrained by holy black and white, the monastic and melancholy scenes and stories of the saints. Black was an absence, austere and tragic. The blues were totemic and a rush of presence. The solemn chase of black has no tease or sentiment. Black absorbed the spirit of natives, the light and motion of shadows. Ravens are blue, the lush sheen of blues in a rainbow, and the transparent blues that shimmer on a spider web in the morning rain. Blues are ironic, the tease of natural light. The night is blue
not black.
Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, our cunning and ambitious uncle, overly praised my brother and encouraged his original artistry. Our determined uncle would have painted blue the entire mission, the face of the priest, earnest sisters, the government school and agents. He had provoked the arbitrary authority of federal agents from the very start of the reservation, and continued his denunciations in every conversation. Our uncle easily provided the newsprint for the blue ravens because he was the independent publisher of the
Tomahawk
, a weekly newspaper on the White Earth Reservation.
Aloysius never painted any images for the priest, black or blue, or for the mission, and he bravely declined the invitation to decorate the newspaper building with totemic portrayals of blue bears, cranes, and ravens. He understood by intuition that our uncle and the priest would exact familiar representations of creatures, and that would dishearten the natural inspiration
of any artist who created a visionary sense of native presence. My brother would never paint to promote newspapers or the papacy.
Blue ravens roost on the fusty monuments.
Aloysius was actually a family stray, but he was never an orphan or outcast in the community. He had been abandoned at birth, a newborn ditched at the black mission gate with no name, note, or trace of paternity. My mother secretly raised us as natural brothers because we were born on the same day, October 22, 1895.
We were born in a world of crucial missions unaware of the Mauve Decade and the Gilded Age and yet we created our own era of Blue Ravens on the White Earth Reservation. That same year of our birth Captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly convicted of treason and dishonored as an artillery officer in France, and Auguste and Louis Lumière set in motion the cinematograph and screened films for the first time at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café at the Place de l'Opéra in Paris.
Two Benedictine Sisters, Philomene Ketten and Lioba Braun, embraced the forsaken child at the mission gate and named him in honor of the compassionate priest. Aloysius was my brother by heart and memory, by native sentiment, and our loyalty was earned by natural scares, and covert confidence, always more secure as brothers in arms than by the mere count and conceit of our paternal blood descent.
Father Aloysius was solemn and solicitous in the presence of the boy who would bear his first name, and the name of a saint. The priest was an honorable servant, and he was much adored by the native parishioners of the reservation mission. Yet, to appreciate his consecrated name in the dark eyes of a forsaken native child would never be the same as a ceremonial epithet on a monument or holy façade.
My mother was not pleased that her second son, my brother by chance, was named in honor of the priest. She respected the priest, the dedication of the sisters, and the mission, but she considered the name too much of a burden on the reservation. The situational caution of that priestly name was soon alleviated, however, when my aunt named her son, born a year earlier, Ignatius. The priestly name was delayed because he was not expected to survive the year. Only then were the honorable namesakes of two priests and two saints acceptable to the mission and to our native families.
Aloysius was never an easy name to pronounce. The teases and ridicule
of his saintly name were constant at the government school, such as, Alley boy, wild son of the mission priest. Mostly the parents of the teasers were members of the Episcopal Church and dedicated critics of the Catholic Mission. Aloysius practiced the artifice of silence and the politics of evasion, similar to the rehearsal of a wise poker player, and he studied the strategies of counter teases. He would pause, turn aside, and declare, “Mostly, the son of tricky saints.” Only the priest, the sisters, and my parents knew that my brother had been abandoned at the mission.
Aloysius was delivered a second time, in a sense, a few days later at our house near Mission Lake. My mother raised us as twins, nurtured us as a timely union, and taught us to perceive the natural motion of the seasons, and the subtle hues of color in nature. She was an artist at heart and might have painted her children blue and united in flight over the reservation. Those early insights and memories were the start of my natural sense of creation stories and family. We were not the same, of course, natives and brothers are never the same, but we became intimate and loyal friends by experience and confidence. We were driven by the same intense curiosity, by a sense of empathy, wonder, the natural surprise of intuition, and always by the tender tease of our mother. She experienced the world through our adventures, and so she teased every scene, gesture, pose, and story.