Flags of Our Fathers (6 page)

The home Ira was born into was a one-room adobe hut built of mesquite posts and arrowhead rock. Sturdy and economical, it faced east in the traditional way, so that each morning its occupants, opening the door, were greeted by the rising sun. A well-swept canvas rug covered the dirt floor; upon it stood a woodstove, a table and chairs, iron bedsteads with cornshuck mattresses. An American flag graced one wall; religious paintings and a Bible were always in evidence.

The front of the house had a traditional
vato,
a shady arbor under which to relax and entertain visitors. Outside, to the west stood a carrel, shed, and storehouse. Built to last for centuries, the Hayes home would still be standing today if it hadn’t been destroyed by vandals in the early 1990’s.

Subsistence farming, cotton-growing, basket-weaving, the chopping and selling of mesquite branches to white town-dwellers for firewood—these were the hard features of survival for most Pima Indians during Ira’s boyhood. Jobe Hayes was a farmer, a cotton harvester, and a chopper of weeds. From Jobe, Ira inherited his complete and utter silence. “He was a quiet man,” Ira’s niece Sara Bernal remembered of Jobe. “He would go days without saying anything unless you spoke to him first.” And Kenny Hayes, Ira’s only living brother, who himself rarely speaks, said only: “My dad hardly ever talked.”

As a little boy, as a young man, and later as an adult, Ira was a quiet person. He didn’t feel any compulsion to make conversation, to break any ice. He could be in another’s presence for hours not talking, silent as the mountains overlooking his reservation. As his boyhood friend Dana Norris told me, “Even though I’m from the same culture, I couldn’t get under his skin. Ira had the characteristic of not wanting to talk.”

And in Ira’s Pima culture being quiet and self-effacing was encouraged. “In our culture, it’s not proper for a Pima to seek recognition,” tribal leader Urban Giff explained to me. Or as Dana Norris put it, “We Pimas are not prone to tooting our own horns.” But Ira wasn’t just quiet; he was a silent island unto himself, already separate from his other Pima friends.

Yet when Ira did speak he displayed a keen mind and an impressive grasp of the English language.

It was his mother, Nancy, a devout Presbyterian, who read to him from the Bible when he was a youngster. Nancy ran an ordered home, volunteered in the community, and was a pillar of the church, which was just a stone’s throw from the Hayeses’ front door.

Nancy saw to it that Ira and his siblings got the best education available. All his life Ira devoured all kinds of books. He was the most prolific letter writer of the six flagraisers. And when it was time for high school she sent them as boarders to the Phoenix Indian School.

But Ira’s literacy wasn’t a rarity. His tribe had a long history of being an advanced culture, compared to other Indian tribes and even white settlers.

“Pima” means “River People,” and for over two thousand years the Pima had lived by the Gila River as successful and peaceful farmers. Before the time of Christ, they had organized an extensive network of irrigation canals to bring water to their crops. Excavations have identified over five hundred miles of canals built by the year 300
B.C.
One book on the Pima states that they had “ruins that crumbled when Rome was still young.”

In 1864 a group of white settlers made the first contact with the Pima. They were escorted by the Commander of the Army of the West, Colonel Stephen Kearny. Colonel Kearny posted guards among the settlers as they mingled with the Pima. But as he later wrote, instead of encountering “wild Indians,” he was surprised to admit that the Pima “surpassed the Christian nations in agriculture” and were “immeasurably before them in honesty and virtue.”

The praise is impressive, coming as it does from an unsentimental warrior more accustomed to slaughtering Indians than tipping his hat to them. But Kearney had it right: He found himself beholding a settled culture, in the southern half of what is now Arizona, that had brilliantly harmonized land, water, crops, and domesticated animals to create a peaceable kingdom of plenty and of virtue.

Central to all this was the art of bringing water to a dry, rainless place: Over the centuries, the Pima canals drained water from the Gila and distributed it skillfully through fertile fields of wheat, corn, squash, beans, melons, and cottonwood trees. The tribe seemed to take its character from the Gila’s deep, generous flow: Unwarlike and rarely invaded, Pima Indians were a sharing people who offered their bounties to other nations and, in time, to the forty-niners and other white nomads making their way across the desert in prairie schooners, headed for California.

This latter gesture may have been a mistake. It drew attention to the paradise the tribe had painstakingly created for itself. In return for the Pimas’ generosity and even protection under attacks by Apaches, the migrating Easterners who settled in Arizona began to help themselves to the same water sources that sustained the peaceful culture.

By the 1870’s, and despite lip-service assurances from the U.S. government, the Pimas’ agricultural system was disrupted. In the 1890’s, agents of the U.S. Geological Survey arrived with plans to rectify the situation. But they wouldn’t listen to the suggestions of the Pimas who had successfully farmed there for centuries. Instead, the United States tore up the canals and replaced them with an unworkable and destructive system.

In 1930, former President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River. He smoked a peace pipe—a custom unknown to the Pima, but gratifying to the newsreel cameramen—and declared that the dam would save the Pima nation from poverty. The Gila’s table continued to fall; not a drop went to the Pima. And so things went, until finally the only way that one could determine that a stream had once flowed through these dry precincts was by looking at that sign beside a bridge on the Pearl Harbor Highway that promised a “Gila River.”

The remarkable thing, given the decades of thievery and ruination of the Pimas, is the legacy of dignity and forbearance that prevails amid their exploited culture. For three quarters of a century, the Pimas had fed starving whites, protected whites against attack by other tribes, never killed a white man, and never robbed one. Moreover, they obligingly took up the names, the clothing, the religion, and the rules and regulations of their exploiters.

In 1917, even though they were not U.S. citizens and thus exempt from military service, a majority of young Pima men waived this right and enlisted to fight in France. Matthew Juan, a Pima, was the first Arizona soldier killed in action in World War I, a fact all Pima young men were proud of.

Ira Hayes’s people are watchers and listeners, not talkers. The voices are spare as they describe Ira, usually referring to what he wasn’t, as if he never revealed who he really was at heart.

“Ira wasn’t playful, he wasn’t competitive,” recalled Dana Norris.

“Ira didn’t go in for games,” his cousin Buddy Lewis remembered.

“The other Hayes boys would tease me,” his niece Sara Bernal recalled, “but not Ira. He was quiet, somewhat distant.”

And when they do describe a distinctive trait of his, it’s always the same: Ira’s total silence, his self-effacement:

“Ira was very shy,” Buddy Lewis told me. “He preferred to stay in the background.”

“Ira didn’t speak unless spoken to,” said Sara Bernal. “He was like his father.”

“Ira was a quiet guy,” Dana Norris confirmed. “Such a quiet guy.”

After grade school on the reservation, Ira went to board at the Phoenix Indian School. There he mixed with Indians of other tribes but retained the sense of himself as distinct, a proud Pima. “He’d come and hang out with his Pima friends,” Dana Norris remembers. “He felt most comfortable around his own kind.”

In three days on Ira’s reservation I spoke with many people who knew Ira. They told me the outlines of Ira’s life; they remember the boy, but he was so totally self-contained they just shook their heads when I asked them about Ira’s attitudes, his beliefs, any distinguishing traits.

Esther Monahan remembered him clearly. A fellow Pima, she attended the Phoenix Indian School with Ira. She saw him daily in their Pima homeroom. But she couldn’t recall Ira’s ever saying anything. Anything at all. She told me:

“Ira wasn’t like the other guys. He was shy and wouldn’t talk to us girls. He was much more shy than the other Pima boys. The girls would chase him and try to hug him, like we did with all the boys. We’d catch the other boys, who enjoyed it. But not Ira. Ira would just run away.”

In time, Ira’s school day would begin with news of faraway battles. “Every morning in school,” Eleanor Pasquale remembers, “we would get a report on World War Two. We would sing the anthems of the Army, the Marines, and the Navy.”

Ira enlisted in the Marines nine months after Pearl Harbor, when he was nineteen. His community sent him off to war with a traditional Pima ceremony.

Fifty-six years later, I was embraced by a similar Pima ceremony on my visit to Arizona. It was a dinner at the Ira Hayes American Legion Post, about a mile from where Ira’s house once stood. I listened to young and old Pima speakers relate proud stories of their culture and felt the warm embrace of community we rarely experience in our Anglo gatherings.

Near the end of the ceremony I was asked to come onstage, and Eleanor Pasquale presented me with a Pima painting. In the center is the legendary Pima figure Su-he (pronounced
Soo-heee
), and in the background is the famous flagraising photo.

Eleanor, a dignified lady who knew Ira, explained the significance of the painting to me. Su-he is a stick figure in the center of a maze. The maze represents all the challenges of life and the center is where peace and security reside. “Like Su-he, if you keep going you can find the center, your peace.”

And what about Ira in the background, I asked.

“We hope in death he has now found his peace,” she answered. “The peace that he couldn’t find on this earth.”

Rene Gagnon: Manchester, New Hampshire

He is the figure hidden by my father in the photo. He stands shoulder to shoulder with John Bradley, only the tip of his helmet and his two hands visible. And in his life he often remained in the background, obscured by others. He was shy, unaggressive, not a standout type of guy. He had little to say when asked a question.

He never imagined life as something to grab hold of and shake. Molded by huge unseen corporate and military forces, he saw his life as that which “they” decided it should be. Life was a question of “luck” or “contacts.”

He wasn’t a man’s man, he never chummed with the guys. The only steps he took in his life were at the suggestion of the women in his life, his mother and later his wife. He always lived with one of them, and other than his time in the Marines, he spent no time out on his own. He followed his wife’s advice in search of the lucky break that never materialized. He listened to her until it was too late. And by then he was trapped for good.

Rene Gagnon arrived on March 7, 1925, the only child of French-Canadian mill workers Henry and Irene Gagnon. French Canadians formed a dense ethnic enclave on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire, in those years; a “Little Canada” in which French was the language and Catholicism the religion. In at least some cases, the menfolk’s notions of propriety were markedly more European than the surrounding Yankee Puritan norm.

Rene might eventually have had some siblings, and a chance at a more self-assured childhood, had not Irene Gagnon decided to take him for some fresh air in his stroller one day during his infancy. Their jaunt might have been unremarkable had not Irene spotted Henry Gagnon strolling along the same street. Henry was in the company of another woman. The other woman, like Irene, was pushing a stroller. In the stroller was another infant—Henry’s, but not Irene’s.

Irene not only divorced Henry; she never allowed him back into her house or her life. She never discussed him with Rene. Rene’s own son, Rene Jr., told me that he believed his father never met the old man until after he had returned home from the war.