Today is one of those days, like July 4th, like Veteran’s Day, that is difficult for us. What the dominant culture celebrates on this day for us too often summons ancestral memories of our peoples at the wrong tip of the military spear. Our histories are riddled with slaughter, massacre, genocide; there’s a reason that many of us neither fly nor salute the American flag, nor stand for the “national anthem.” It’s impossible to venerate the tools of our own destruction.
And even as one of our own most powerful and potent symbols of Spirit’s power was appropriated, stolen by that same military and force and its government for use as a symbol of its own power, our men were conscripted as cannon fodder, yet those who managed to survive were denied the benefits of actual citizenship upon their return. ‘Suitable to die on the front lines, but not to vote upon their own interests.
Upon their own land.
My own father avoided service in World War II, although not by choice. At 17, he sneaked away from home to go into town to enlist. While he was undergoing the medical intake at the local draft board, his father appeared in the outer office, thundering as only he could do, and managed to invoke the powers of that amorphous principle that would later become known as the so-called “Private Ryan Rule.” My uncles were already stationed elsewhere (one of them would spend significant time in a Russian POW camp a few years later), and Gramps was not about to lose the last person available to carry on with the family business.
To this day, I find it difficult to believe that Gramps got his way, but I am told by those who knew him that he was a force of Nature: short in stature, towering in spirit, able to intimidate even military officers by sheer force of will.
Wings’s father, on the other hand, was drafted. During World War II, he spent much of his vocational time as a cook, and I’m told he was developed into quite a stellar one, too. He survived the war to return home to his beloved wife, his people, the village, their traditional ways.
And yet, after laying his life on the line, still he could not cast a vote.
In theory, our peoples were “granted” citizenship (upon our own lands!) in 1924. It was a federal law, the Indian Citizenship Act. However, whereas for white people, “citizenship” carried with an automatic right to vote, “citizenship” as applied to Natives was not conceived to include such a “right.” Instead, whether Native people were afforded the right to participate in the electoral process was left in the hands of the states, creating a slowly-evolving patchwork of “granted rights” and denials thereof, and as a practical matter, most Natives continued to be denied the vote as a matter of law for two more generations.
That is not, sadly, a phenomenon that has ended in Indian Country.
Despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Indian Country is one of the most fertile breeding grounds for the poison that is race-based voter suppression. Our peoples are denied the right to vote at perhaps the highest percentage of any other demographic group. Oh, yes, it is, theoretically, at least, de facto and de jure now. But the racism comes through loud and clear in the fine print of the election laws that are used to make it difficult, and in some places, virtually impossible, for Native peoples to exercise their political voice.
Our ancestors did not die for this.
Nor did our contemporaries. Native Americans enlist in the U.S. military at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the nation. Read that again: the.highest.rate.
Wings was fortunate enough to escape service in VietNam on religious grounds; my brother was not, nor were too many other men we know. Some of our friends are still, nearly a half-century later, still dealing with the physical damage of that illegal war. They’re also still dealing with the psychological scars, which for some are far worse.
So, too, are too many of our younger generation, those who were swept up in the illegal and wholly colonialist war this country launched on a previously-stable Middle East nation some dozen years ago.
A couple of years ago, we ran into one of the young men who had returned from tours in Iraq; he’s one of Wings’s young cousins. When I first saw him, he was wearing the readily-identifiable navy blue T-shirt with bright gold letters spelling out F.B.I. Coming closer, we could see the fine print below the letters: “Fry Bread Inspector.”
We laughed, but his eyes were haunted.
Today, there will be a color guard at the old village, honoring the Pueblo’s members who did not return, and paying respect to those who made it home alive.
On days like this, when the air is filled with the sound of celebratory gunfire and of straight pipes from those converging on the area for the annual motorcycle rally, when the winds carry the scent of charcoal and lighter fluid and scorched meat, when businesses in town are filled with “white sales” (irony, that) and coupons and discounts and promotional fodder for the generating of dollars . . . .
On days like this, we’re fortunate to have the luxury of withdrawing from the riot of noisy commerce. We will spend the day on ordinary tasks, carrying with us the memory of our ancestors as we work. And we will offer prayers of thanks for their sacrifices, yes, but also for their very existence, for our peoples’ survival.
We’ll send those prayers aloft to Spirit on the wings of the Eagle who represents all they are and were and will be.
~ Aji
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