Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (27 page)

Picasso and other artists heard the voices of native artists in exhibitions and musty galleries, and created original portrayals that honor a union of cultures not ethnographers. The voices of visionary artists were never derivative, and the voices of native artists were heard in the hues of blue horses afloat, in hide paintings, masks, crowns, ceremonial feathers, water drums, medicine bundles, wing bones, bears, sandhill cranes, ravens, great waves of blue, and traces of rouge. Curators and custodians of native art never mentioned these cosmototemic voices in museums.

The train swayed that night through the gritty industrial areas outside the great
circles of art, galleries, ateliers, and memories of Paris. My brother was asleep, his head rested against the frame of the carriage window. I watched the slight reflection of my face in motion through the dark countryside and was reminded once more of the war.

The Paris Peace Conference was about to start. Our furlough was over and we would soon return home. I read book eight of
The Odyssey
that night and then waited for the first tease of morning light.
The company then laid their hands upon the good things that were before them, but as soon as they had had enough to eat and drink, the muse inspired Demodocus to sing the feats of heroes, and more especially a matter that was then in the mouths of all men, to wit, the quarrel between Ulysses and Achilles, and the fierce words that they heaped on one another as they eat together at a banquet.

› 17 ‹

D
ECEIT OF
P
EACE

— — — — — — —
1919
— — — — — — —

The First Pioneer Infantry marched down the dock at Le Port Militaire in Brest and one by one the regiments boarded the shabby steamship
Ancon.
The departure was solemn that early summer, no salutes or martial music to honor the soldiers who had defended the French Third Republic.

Slowly the bright colors of the sailboats and steady beams of the solitary harbor vanished in the distance. The Atlantic Ocean was stormy, heavy waves, and the constant heave, mount, and shudder of the ship was the last reminder of the war, but the return voyage was more secure with no chance of enemy submarines. The ship docked two weeks later without notice, fanfare, or even a biscuit to honor the soldiers at Newport News, Virginia, on July 7, 1919.

The American Expeditionary Forces had entered the war late and yet became a critical episode, and a mighty sway in the modern history of France. We were the crucial native soldiers of defense, the worthy descendants of the fur trade, a painter and resolute writer, and we had survived with pluck and backbone as combat scouts. Then, at the end of the war, we carried out with other soldiers the dreary winter mission of a military occupation in Germany.

The Paris Peace Conference started on January 18, 1919, in Paris. The agents of a new German government endorsed the Treaty of Versailles five months later on June 28, 1919. The First Pioneer Infantry had occupied Koblenz during the final political maneuvers of peace. We might have been home earlier if the treaty had not been concocted with such vengeance.

Once a soldier, once a war, once an armistice, our honorable discharge from military service was processed in a few days time and then we returned with other soldiers and our mail order olive drab wool sweaters and chamois money belt to the Ogema Station on the White Earth Reservation.

The train stopped at the same godly towns that we had counted on our way to war last summer. A year later nothing seemed to have changed,
nothing but the memory of many soldiers who would not return from the First World War.

Ogema Station was almost at the end of the railroad line, so we observed the exaltation at every station for the soldiers who had survived, and at the same time the great sorrow for the wounded and the many soldiers who had died in combat and were buried in France. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers had died in the war, and twice as many soldiers were wounded in service with the American Expeditionary Forces.

The railroad stations were decorated with patriotic banners, and as the train arrived parents and teachers coached the children to salute with one hand and with the other hand wave miniature Stars and Stripes. The soldiers who returned that summer were hardly prepared to become the precious resurrection of patriotism and cheap labor in wearisome small towns.

Patch was seated at the window with his trumpet and at the ready to play military taps at every railroad stop between Chicago and the Ogema Station on the White Earth Reservation. Naturally, we were moved by the sound of ceremonial taps, and yet we were constantly reminded of the political misuse of the rituals of honor and the extravagance of patriotism at every station.

Aloysius painted nothing on our return to the reservation. He could not paint the reversal of war. In that sense our return was an absence of creative motion and energy. We were both inspired by the mystery, anxiety, and irony of the passage to war, to the country of our ancestors of the fur trade, but the actual return was futile, and the sense of vain nostalgia only increased with the patriotic hurrah and celebrations at each station.

My brother turned away from the romantic praise of uniforms, heroic war rumors, and courage promoted by military decorations. He honored only the actual soldiers, and could not imagine any scene of our reversal that was worth painting. The blue ravens refused to return to the reservation that summer at the end of the war. The homey overtones of peace, the war to end wars, were deceptions and scarcely worth comment, paint, or conversation.

The fury of the war continued in our memories, and there were no easy reversals of our experiences as scouts. The wistful notion of peace was more of a hoax, a theatrical and political revision, than a turnaround of hatred and remorse. Count more than fifteen million bloody bodies, twenty million
wounded soldiers, and then consider the use of the word
peace
over wine, banquet conversations, and war memories.

The French count more than a million dead soldiers, or about four percent of the national population. The survivors must honor the dead at the end of war, but not by the political return to the deceit of national and cultural peace.

Naturally, we embraced the presence of the seasons, chance, native stories, and memories, but the horror of the war, and our experiences as combat scouts became a burden of nasty shadows and a revulsion of the political postures of patriotism. Yes, we were once soldiers, but never the patriots of a nostalgic culture of peace. Most soldiers returned to small towns and cities. We returned to a federal occupation on the reservation. Our return to the reservation was neither peace nor the end of the war. The native sense of chance and presence on the reservation had always been a casualty of the civil war on native liberty.

My spirit had been wounded by the war, but the notion of a bruised war memory was much too conceited an emotion to share with others in conversations. The soldiers with actual bloody wounds of combat, shattered, burned, blistered, disfigured faces, and severed limbs deserved the greatest honors, quiet honors, cautious humor, and the humane native tease of remembrance.

I was aware of my wounds when we hawked newspapers and first visited the library in Minneapolis. The comparisons of federal and church politics on the reservation, the repressive government schools, and the generous cosmopolitan world of art and literature revealed the wounds of my spirit.

Even more of a burden, my spirit was weakened by the sudden death of Augustus. He demanded that we learn about other worlds, and he was not sentimental or romantic. My uncle always lived by the native courage of resistance, and at the same time he celebrated chance and the ironies of liberty. He was direct, difficult, tricky, a steady teacher, and never wavered in his loyalty.

There were great native stories but no inspired literature or art on the reservation, and it was not easy on our return from the war to imagine otherwise. My mother would understand, of course, but she would be over burdened because of her perception and empathy of my moody ideas about an indefinable and wounded spirit.

I know my mother had read the published stories about the war, and since the end of the war my stories have obviously avoided the gratuitous and conceited notions of my abstract wounds and miseries. Surely she understood that there were more war scenes that were not published in my stories.

I watched the reflection of my face on the train window, the ethereal motion of my eyes in the trees and meadows, and was reminded of that moment outside the art gallery ten years earlier when the setters and our faces in the window moved with other faces on the streetcar. I considered the creation of my stories in motion, a great literature of motion, but not on the reservation.

Paris easily came to mind, and especially in motion on the train. My memories turned easily to the stories of the banquet and to that marvelous dinner party with Marie Vassilieff and Nathan Crémieux at Le Chemin du Montparnasse.

I read book nine of
The Odyssey
as the train departed from the Milwaukee Road Depot in Minneapolis.
There is nothing better or more delightful than when a whole people make merry together, with the guests sitting orderly to listen, while the table is loaded with bread and meats, and the cup bearer draws wine and fills his cup for every man. This is indeed as fair a sight as a man can see. Now, however, since you are inclined to ask the story of my sorrows, and rekindle my own sad memories in respect of them, I do not know how to begin, nor yet how to continue and conclude my tale, for the hand of heaven has been laid heavily upon me.

› 18 ‹

B
ANQUET
F
RANCAIS

— — — — — — —
1919
— — — — — — —

The Soo Line Railroad engineer sounded the screechy whistle four times as the train approached the decorated platform of the Ogema Station. The soldiers on the train were mostly our relatives, fur trade boys from the White Earth Reservation.

William Hole in the Day, Ignatius Vizenor, Charles Beaupré, and Fred Casebeer were honored by five traditional native elders at the train station, and our cousin Ellanora Beaulieu, who had served as a nurse and died of influenza at the end of the war, was honored with the soldiers.

Corporal Lawrence Vizenor, our cousin, who had received the Distinguished Service Cross, was revered that late afternoon for his extraordinary bravery in combat with the enemy.

Then seventeen other soldiers who had served in the war were honored at the station. The beat of the drums was strong and steady, and the native soldiers were ordered to stand at attention on the platform. The traditional singers and elders wore native ceremonial vests, beaded sashes, and carried medicine bundles. The spirited voices of the elders reached to the thunderclouds, and the sound rose above the steady steam of the train engine.

We honor the flag
We honor your bravery
And we sing to honor

Your return as warriors.

Patch Zhimagaanish played ceremonial taps on his trumpet. We saluted the elders, and then at the verge of rage shouted out the names of the dead, Hole in the Day, Vizenor, Beaupré, Casebeer, Beaulieu, to honor the memory of their spirits and native presence as warriors. Public tributes to the warriors and the native dead were never the end of stories, or a truce of remembrance, and likewise peace was never a reversal of war memories.

Father Aloysius gestured with the sign of the cross, and then he bowed his head to honor the singers and the soldiers. I was moved by the songs, by the honors, and then looked to the thunderclouds over the station.

The railroad engineer waited for the ceremonies to conclude. He had delivered soldiers to many towns since the end of the war, but had never delayed the schedule of the train until our arrival at the Ogema Station. The engineer admired natives and he was especially impressed by the dedication of Patch Zhimagaanish. The entire memorial scene would have been shrouded in steam, and the sound of native singers, drumbeats, and trumpet obscured had the engineer started the great engine on schedule.

Odysseus stood near the railroad engineer, and at the end of the honors and native ceremonies he moved slowly through the crowd on the platform, and sang loudly the patriotic anthem, “My Country, 'Tis of Thee.”

We were not surprised that he had heightened the anthem with the addition of new verses. As the trader walked and sang others joined in the music, and the crowd on the platform became a great patriotic choir. Men and women removed their hats, touched their hearts, and sang to the thunderclouds.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died
…
From ev'ry mountainside
Let freedom ring!
…
My native country, thee,
Where all men are born free, if white's their skin;
I love thy hills and dales,
Thy mounts and pleasant vales;

But hate thy negro sales, as foulest sin.

Odysseus had omitted a single line from the original patriotic song,
Land of the Pilgrim's Pride
, and then included a selection from the sardonic verses written by an abolitionist. The trader was never reluctant to tease
anyone with an ironic reference to the pride of pilgrims and native land. The station choir hesitated over the absent verse, and then most natives sang along with the revised section of the anthem.

Odysseus inspired most of the natives at the station, but never the federal agent who frowned at the words “negro sales” and was clearly pained by the irony of music. Foamy had never been at ease with natives or at public events. I smiled and waved to the agent, but he knew my gestures were not sincere. He turned to leave and never honored the soldiers.

Naturally, our parents were there at the train station. They had waited in the shade near the ticket office with the station agent, and then when the ceremonies ended they pushed through the crowd and beamed with excitement.