at risk, because the separation of natives on federal exclaves was never intended to encourage enterprise, to nurture curiosity, creative art, music, or literature, or to plainly advance the principles of justice and liberty. The nasty exclaves were contrived to exploit natural resources at the crude expense of native totemic rights, but these predictable deceptions actually gave rise to resistance and the steady subversion of federal policies.
The natives were dirt poor, several timber companies had cut down most of the white pine, and the beaver and other totemic animals had been decimated in the fur trade. The great comedown of the national economy and the untold breadlines turned the cities into new reservations without the tease of treaties. Only the memories of bloody war scenes changed our art, not the ironies of poverty. The older men on the reservation were marginal trappers, and yet native families were steadfast and supported the soldiers with the purchase of Liberty Bonds. Native women who were too poor to buy bonds packed war bandages, and the rate of native combat casualties was much higher than that of any other order of soldiers in the First World War. More than the Germans, more than the French, more than the British, but not more than the high casualties of the colonial soldiers from Asia and Africa, and never more casualties than the African American soldiers who served in combat with the mighty Harlem Hellfighters.
Native veterans, my mother, and thousands of other natives on reservations and in cities were flat broke at the end of the war, destitute ten years later, and the apathetic federal government delayed the repayment of the bond money and dickered with the bonus money promised to veterans of the war. President Herbert Hoover vetoed the whole bonus for veterans and at the same time favored the rich, especially the millionaire and financier Andrew Mellon, the United States secretary of the treasury. The rich became even richer during the war, and workers who stayed home were advanced with higher salaries at the same time that soldiers faced the horrors of mustard gas and heavy artillery in combat. The very same government that advertised national patriotism to recruit native soldiers, and then touted war bonds on reservations, carried out policies of separatism. Most natives who served were not recognized as citizens of the country. Later, the abuse of veterans and the veto of the bonus by the president became the incentive to muster the Bonus Expeditionary Force, a great bond of memories, truth stories, and soldiery unions of culture, race, and liberty.
The union of veterans defied the politics of race.
Hermann Everhart, a retired bank president, one of the prosperous heirs of the war, proposed to purchase forty of the abstract blue ravens for an unnamed collector of native art through a gallery in Berlin, but the banker turned down the three abstract paintings that represented with names the native women from the reservation who had served in the First World War.
Blue Raven shunned the elegant banker that afternoon at the station and refused to accept the specific offer because it dishonored our cousins and the others. By Now served as a nurse and treated combat wounds on the Hindenburg Line. Ellanora Beaulieu enlisted as a nurse and was assigned to the American Army of Occupation in Germany. She served in a hospital, healed the enemy soldiers, and then she died of influenza in the same hospital. The painting in her name showed an enormous detached shadow of her broken face as a blue raven in flight over an ambulance and razed landscape, with heavy traces of rouge on the feathers. The blue shadow reached beyond the deckle edge of the paper, the features of a raven and human with no boundaries.
Everhart expressed his regret for the slight of native nurses, doubled the purchase price, and accepted the entire collection of original blue raven portrayals. He obviously was ready to pay more because he traveled with a wooden crate to transport the art. The abstract totemic paintings were packed and shipped by train to New York, then by a slow boat to Europe, and delivered to a gallery in Berlin, Germany.
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TOMBSTONE BONUS
The United States Congress passed the World War Adjustment Act on Monday, May 19, 1924. Five years and hundreds of promises after the armistice of the First World War, and hardly anyone noticed the war bonus legislation that most veterans turned down. The Bonus Act provided only limited loans, not a real bonus of cash, and the loans would be deducted with interest from final cash payment in some twenty years.
The Indian Citizenship Act was passed two weeks later, one more overdue bonus. Reservation natives were declared citizens of the United States of America. The act was ironic, of course, and with no trace of remorse. The provisions of citizenship would not “in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” The white pine stumps, dams, and flooded wild rice beds were the ironic provisions of “other property.”
The Bonus Act empowered tricky loans, and was rightly named the Tombstone Bonus because most natives would probably be dead by the time the government dealt with payments. Most veterans were on the road in search of a meal and a place to live and work years before the Great Depression, and on federal reservations most natives were the designated prisoners of poverty.
The United States Veterans Bureau was directed to deliver the Adjusted Service Certificates of the Bonus Act on the birthdate of each veteran, the pretense of a money gift. Government policies were seldom explained, and the reason certificates were delivered on the birthdays of veterans remained a great mystery.
White Earth Reservation veterans waited and waited to compare the birthday certificates. My certificate arrived two months after my birthday. Aloysius never received one, and later we learned the document had been delivered by mistake to Aloysius Hermanutz, the principal priest at Saint Benedict’s Mission.
John Clement Beaulieu, my cousin, who had served with the combat engineers, raised a stink that the certificates were one more hoax of federal agents, and the government ruse became a game to create the most outrageous stories of the delayed secret birthday certificates.
Certificate names were erased in bright light.
Certificates arrived only on cloudy days.
Parchment certificates were used as ledgers.
Certificates were shunted in cattle cars.
The Ice Woman lured the delivery agents.
Hungry packs of mongrels ate the certificates.
Certificates were traded for white lightning.
Certificates were treaties held in trust.
Certificates were no better than land allotments.
My crafty bonus certificate was delivered on a cloudy afternoon, and with my name and the exact amount clearly printed on the parchment paper, but the provisions of the take back loan with interest were hard to read in the fine print. Truly, the great government hoaxers had prepared a late birthday Tombstone Bonus.
IT IS HEREBY CERTIFIED that pursuant to The World War Adjustment Act and in conformity with the laws of the United States, the amount named, FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE Dollars, less any indebtedness including interest, lawfully incurred and due hereon, shall become due and payable on the first day of January 1945, to Basile Hudon Beaulieu, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota.
The certificate was payable after my fiftieth birthday, and the money would have lost value in that time, and most veterans were angry and rejected the deceit of a puny loan provided by the Tombstone Bonus.
The bonus was one more withered promise.
Dummy waved with the diva puppets in hand and the mongrels bayed on the platform
