cookery was known by hundreds of visitors who had arrived by train, many staying overnight for the delicious meals prepared by Messy. The stories of that great dinner at the end of the war, more than a decade ago, have become more spirited with recounting, and on that occasion we were two worried veterans, tormented with night terrors of combat, and at the same time we were teased and put right by the best healers on the reservation.
Odysseus, the trader, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, publisher of the Tomahawk, Catherine Heady, the precise government schoolteacher, Damon Mendor, the only medical doctor at the White Earth Hospital, and the Benedictine mission priest, Aloysius Hermanutz, kindly diverted my brother, my cousin Lawrence, our close friend Patch Zhimaaganish, and me with praise and glory stories.
Misaabe and his tender mongrel healers Mona Lisa, Nosey, and Ghost Moth, transmuted the night terrors into the natural motion of dreams and visual memories, and restored the natural rift and fault of sounds. Memories of the Banquet Français, French wine, absinthe, and stories of war, literature, blue ravens, and the mighty mongrel healers, were resumed with the radio broadcast of Hänsel und Gretel that afternoon at the Leecy Hotel.
The Niinag Trickster was an erotic healer.
The matinee radio event was held in the hotel dining room with chairs placed in two curved rows. Some visitors had arrived from Pine Point, Callaway, and Naytahwaush, and the local guests gathered around the Silvertone radio console with the government teachers, the federal agent, the priest, and a vicar. John Leecy turned the gold dial, and tuned the green eye to the station.
Milton Cross introduced the story of the opera in a clear and evocative tone of voice. He praised the sopranos, and then actually escorted the radio audience, and our good company at the hotel, into the theater, describing the hush as the lights were dimmed, and the slow rise of the great gold curtains. We heard the soprano Queena Mario as Gretel and Editha Fleischer as Hänsel in the glorious matinee broadcast of the opera. Dorothea Flexer sang the fairy tale scenes of the Sandman, and the gorgeous soprano Pearl Besuner was the Dew Fairy.
The radio sound was clear but not as vital or perfectly pitched as the phonograph records of the opera sopranos. The transmission waves distorted the sounds, the sopranos wavered, but the static on records was steady. Miinan and Queena, the diva mongrels, were allowed to sit at the side of the dining room during the broadcast, and only once Queena raised her golden head and softly bayed in harmony with the well known opera scenes. The audience responded with easy laughter and then applauded the lovely mongrel rendition. The Metropolitan Opera was truly honored that night with the great cuisine at the Leecy Hotel.
The Niinag Trickster was reserved at the opera.
Dummy and the five mongrels were rescued from poverty and boredom by the hand puppets, and only the backward priests and adverse federal agents resisted the obvious spectacle and tricky parodies the puppets delivered to natives. She created puppets that had a greater sense of presence and character than the agents of the church and state. Only once the nuns invited the mongrels and puppets to stage a show at the mission school. The students were dazzled with the bouncy motion of the puppets and moved closer to imitate their gestures, and to mimic the chants, light moans, and sweet bays of the mongrels.
The mission students bounced with the puppets.
Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu, my brother, painted his first distinctive blue ravens on newsprint more than thirty years ago at the Ogema Train Station. That summer we waited for the passengers to arrive on two daily trains, and sold copies of the Tomahawk, the first independent weekly newspaper on the White Earth Reservation. I wrote my first stories that summer, the creative imitations of national and international news reports, and my brother created incredible scenes of enormous blue ravens perched on the trains, huge shadows of wings over the state bank, over the hospital, mission, and over the livery at the Leecy Hotel. Our uncle was the publisher of the newspaper, and we were paid for the sale of each copy.
The Ogema Station was always a place of quirky stories, imagination, adventure and irony. We pretended many times to board the trains to destinations outside the reservation, Winnipeg, Chicago, and once our uncle bought tickets for us to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art. We were fourteen years old that summer, and named the tiny farm towns down to the enormous train terminal on the great Mississippi River. Eight years later we were mustered with our cousins and more than forty other natives to serve as combat infantry soldiers in the bloody First World War in France. The station had become a touchstone of original art by my brother, and my first written stories, and no one ever forgot that last poignant ceremony on the platform when native soldiers returned from the war with no certainty of citizenship. Nurse By Now returned from the Hindenburg Line with stories of wounded farm boys and her steady mount named Black Jack. The French truly honored us more than the government of the United States, and for that reason we enlisted in the Bonus Expeditionary Force and marched with thousands of other combat veterans at the Capitol in Washington.
Aloysius, my brother, became a distinguished native painter and his abstract blue ravens have been exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and Ogema. His original totemic fauvism, or abstract expressionism of watercolors and broken features of humans and ravens, started at the end of the war. The distortions, visual tone, and crash of colors were inspired mostly by the paintings of Marc Chagall and the elusive Chaïm Soutine. We had met these great artists in Paris.
My best stories started with our experience as combat soldiers, and later revealed the wonder, excitement, and uncertainty of expressionistic art and surreal literature in Paris after the bloody ruins of empire war, the low roads of enlightenment, and the deceits and swindles of civilization. My stories were published first in weekly issues of the Tomahawk and later as an edited collection in a newspaper magazine, The Paris Fur Trade by Basile Hudon Beaulieu. My brother and the other veterans on the reservation first nicknamed me the Furrier and later the Teaser. Furrier described the trade of words in my stories, and Teaser the play of scenes and characters.
Dummy and the two puppets, and many other natives, were at the station that spring to stand with veterans and to honor the memory of native casualties in the First World War. My brother painted bold abstract blue ravens in brutal war scenes for every native soldier and nurse who had served in the war. The totemic fauvist portrayals at the exhibition first appeared chaotic, fractured images of once familiar shapes and faces, frowns and smiles, and my brother refused, as usual, to explain the extreme forms and features compared to his earlier portrayals of blue ravens, those spectacular waves of blue ravens in various states of necessary rage, and with mighty claws and bold shadows over scenes of war and the reservation. Totemic Fauvism: Faces of Blue Raven Veterans was the first exhibition of art at the train station, and the original watercolors were only for sale to support native veterans on the reservation.
My brother had become a well known artist, but the market on the reservation for abstract expressionism and mainly his style of totemic fauvism was imaginary at best, and the actual market for expressionistic art of any kind was truly inconceivable for anyone but the very rich during the Great Depression. We were native veterans, an artist and a writer, with no chance of work or income on the reservation, and yet we were not authorized to leave without permission from a federal agent. The policy of consent was seldom enforced, a cruel irony of civilization and democracy. We created with paint and literary scenes an aesthetic liberty, but never pretended to be better than other natives or veterans. Yet we had original scenes and stories to deliver, truth stories of a totemic union of native memory and art. Nothing was more relevant at the time than a book, a painting, and the marvelous hand puppets.
Federal policies were withered promises.
The obvious burdens of the Great Depression were overcome with the spirited motion of the Ice Woman and Niinag Trickster, and several other puppets that my brother created later at the Bonus March in Washington.
The White Earth Reservation
