moment outside of school was a sense of fugitive adventures. We shared the notions of chance, totemic connections, and the tricky stories of our natural transience in the world. We were delivered by stories, and our best stories were nothing more than the chance of remembrance. My brother was delivered by chance, we learned years later, and that clearly demonstrated our confidence in stories of coincidence and fortuity.
Margaret, our mother, never revealed the mission secret that my brother was a reservation stray, a newborn of obscure paternity, and apparently that we were not related by blood, until that early summer when we were drafted and departed by train for military service in the American Expeditionary Forces in France.
Our mother was a herbal healer and insisted that her son the artist use only natural paint colors. She provided the natural blue tints that my brother used to paint ravens. Blue was not a common native pigment, so the blue ravens were doubly distinctive. The pale blue tints were made with crushed plum, blue berries, or the roots of red cedar. My mother boiled decomposed maple stumps and included fine dust of various soft stones to concoct the rich darker hues of blue and purple. The synthetic ultramarine powder from traders was not suitable for painting.
Most of the blue ravens were abstract, with huge dark blue angular beaks and almost human eyes. The curves of the wings were broken in flight, and several feathers were painted with elaborate details. Some ravens were turned upside down in flight, as ravens turn over, cant, bounce, and play in flight with other ravens over the mission and post office.
My brother painted blue ravens as sentries at the stone gate of the hospital, and that troubled the priest more than a naked woman, even more than the stories that my brother was the son of the priest. The giant claws of the abstract raven were painted dark blue, with faint veins and the broad traces of human hands. Two claws were curved with cracked fingernails. The two blue sentry ravens wore masks. The huge beaks were outlined and distorted, and turned to the side of the ravens.
Aloysius truly painted abstract scenes by inspiration not by mere duplication or representation, and yet the priest was concerned that he had painted the images of demons in the ravens. My brother had never seen the haunting images of raven masks with monstrous beaks worn by medical doctors during the Black Plague in Europe.
Aloysius was curious, of course, but my brother had already established his own expressionistic form and style, abstract blue ravens in the natural world, and the chance associations of material scenes in cities. Later he had created blue ravens of war, and he would continue to create his inspired scenes of blue ravens over the parks, statues, and bridges over the River Seine in Paris.
No one on the reservation would have associated the abstract blue ravens with the modern art movements of impressionism or expressionism, or the avant-garde, and certainly not compared the color and style of the inspired raven scenes on the reservation with the controversial painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso. Yet, my brother painted by inspiration the original abstract blue ravens at the same time that Picasso created The Brothel of Avignon, the translated title, in 1907. Picasso was swayed by the notion of primitive scenes. The five naked women were pitched to the viewer, angular, gawky, excessive, abstract, and two women wore masks, the obvious influence and deliberate conceptual imitation of primitive art that had been exhibited at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.
Aloysius accepted the crown of chance, an uncertain destiny and saintly name, and became a soldier and artist in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. We served together as scouts in the same division and infantry regiment, and survived the unbearable memories of shattered blue faces in the brush, broken bodies, small bare bones in the muck, and solitary tremors of hands and hearts in the ruins of war. The eyes of soldiers at the end turned hoary with no trace of rage, sense of solemn touch, shimmer of blood, or praise of irony.
We were brothers on the reservation, brothers in the bloody blue muck of the trenches, slow black rivers, brick shambles of farms and cities, brothers of the untold dead at gruesome stations. Bodies were stacked by the day for a wretched roadside funeral in the forest ruins. We were steadfast brothers on the road of lonesome warriors, a native artist and writer ready to transmute the desolation of war with blue ravens and poetic scenes of a scary civilization and native liberty.
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The Italian Aloysius of Gonzaga, a sixteenth-century saint, was castle born and encouraged by his mighty father to become a soldier. He was a warrior only in name. Aloysius the original renounced his inheritance to become a priest and vowed chastity, poverty, and obedience, a comely ritual of conceit, monotheistic separation, and ancestral agony.
Father Aloysius Hermanutz was born in the ancient Kingdom of Württemberg in 1853. He studied to become a Benedictine priest and dedicated his godly service and obedience to the care, conversion, and education of natives for some fifty years at Saint Benedict’s Mission on the White Earth Reservation. Aloysius, my brother, continues his saintly name in the marvelous artistry of a painter, not in the doctrines of monotheism, obedience, and the noticeable pain of priestly courtesy.
Saint Aloysius envisioned his own death at age twenty-three on June 21, 1591. Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu was drafted with me and other native relatives at the very same age and in the same month some three centuries later as ordinary infantry soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War.
The chance connections of soldiers and saints.
Ignatius Vizenor and many of our other cousins enlisted or were drafted that same summer to serve as soldiers in the ironic name of the Great War. Ignatius was the namesake of Father Ignatius Tomazin, and more notably of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Ignatius, our cousin, was the firstborn of Michael and Angeline Vizenor. He was raised with four brothers and two sisters. Joseph, the last born, was elected many years later as the manager of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe in Minnesota. Ignatius and his brother Lawrence, who was a year younger, were privates in the American Expeditionary Forces in France.
The Beaulieu and Vizenor families praised and raised large godly families, a legacy of the fur trade and that premier native union with spirited descendants of New France. The families were mostly devout but they became cautious Roman Catholics after the First World War and the Great Depression. Absolute devotion to a church or a saint was more uncertain after the massive death and destruction of an unspeakable world war and the absolute desperation of extreme poverty.
Many native fur trade families came together with new and obscure traditions, the union of blood and treasure to honor and defend France. A disproportionate number of natives enlisted and others were drafted to serve in the military, and their reservation families invested in patriotic war bonds to cover the cost of the American Expeditionary Forces.
Peter Vizenor, or Vezina, and Sophia Trotterchaud raised fourteen children, including Abraham, Henry, and Michael who married Angeline Cogger. Peter was a native hunter and fur trader at the time the reservation was established in 1868. Two of their children married and raised twenty more children. Abraham Vizenor and Margaret Fairbanks, for instance, raised five boys and six girls on the reservation. Henry Vizenor and Alice Mary Beaulieu raised nine children on the reservation and then the family moved to Minneapolis at the end of the Great Depression.
Clement Hudon Beaulieu and Elizabeth Farling raised ten children and were removed by the federal government from Old Crow Wing to the new White Earth Reservation. Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, the firstborn, founded and was publisher of the Progress, and later the Tomahawk, the first weekly newspapers published on the reservation. Clement Hudon Beaulieu, the eighth child and namesake of his father, became a priest in the Episcopal Church. Charles Hudon Beaulieu served in the Civil War and was promoted from private to captain in the Ninth Minnesota Volunteers. Theodore Basile Beaulieu, the youngest of the ten children, married
