for work, and the last time we made tracks was our return to Paris the year Warren Harding was inaugurated president. He endorsed assimilation policies and undermined native water and mineral rights on the White Earth Reservation. We had returned to the reservation three years later when Harding died and the Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Salo issued special train tickets for Lawrence Star Boy Vizenor, Paul Plucky Fairbanks, Aloysius Blue Raven Hudon Beaulieu, and for Basile Hudon Beaulieu to travel from Ogema to Washington with a train change in Chicago. John Leecy paid for the train tickets, one more gesture of respect for our combat service in the war. Star Boy was an infantry veteran decorated for bravery, and Plucky was a native fancy dance soldier who earned his nickname for bold maneuvers behind enemy lines. He stole cigarettes, tea, biscuits, and potatoes from the Germans. Most of the plucky booty had been stolen earlier from the French and Americans. We were brothers, cousins, and outraged veterans on our way to serve in the Bonus Expeditionary Force, that crucial war between the bonus veterans and Herbert Hoover, the crude political engineer of the Great Depression and the president of the United States.
Blue Raven amused the children and their mothers on the train with the hand puppets. No, he never raised the pecker of the trickster, but instead he created the first hand puppet in our bonus patrol, suitably named Herbert Tombstone. The head of the puppet was made with a small condensed milk can, perfectly dented with bright eyes and a wide moustache scratched into the rusty metal. The droopy fingers were braided twine, and the presidential puppet was dressed in tatters, sleeves of rags, a chest of dirty velvet, and heavy canvas shoes. The hand puppet wore a red banner, “Tombstone Treaty Bonus.”
The children on the train were truly enchanted by the presence of the ragged and chatty tin can, and the scenes of the hand puppet were more believable because most of the children were familiar with the Tin Man in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a novel written for children by L. Frank Baum. The train might have become the Land of Oz for a few moments between stations, and the children worried about the pet dog, Toto. We teased my brother because he was a very convincing tin head hand talker, and later he painted the bright Flag of Oz with the green star on the banner of the puppet named Herbert Tombstone.
The train swayed through the vast mausoleums of industry, gray, black, and shiny that afternoon in the rain, and abandoned with no shadows, no trace of urgency, no factory workers, and slowly clacked into Grand Central Station at Chicago. We had arrived on May 30, 1932, Decoration Day, in a station of stony stares, rumors, and the misery of the Great Depression. Yet there were ritzy women at hand with fur collars, and the moneyed men were dressed in tailored suits. Plucky named the dressy tourists the Puppets of the Pullman Cars. The men outside the station were downcast in gray fedoras and packed in rows on every shabby corner in the light rain, and downcast women hovered with their gaunt children at the entrance to the station, the untold sufferers of the dead economy.
Plucky waved at people around the station and worried when no one returned the friendly gesture. “Natives joke about misery, laugh over poverty, shout out at the bears, but even the smiles of this city have been stolen by Hoover and the monogrammed bankers of Wall Street.” Not a single smile was visible, and we realized the futility of the hand puppets in the world of hungry strangers.
Chicago was a reservation of newcomers with no sense of chance or easy way to portray the contortions of empires, the brokers of democracy, and the native humor of poverty. The hand puppets were ready to treat and tease the children, but the elders were more prepared for vaudeville, popular songs, and crappy public poetry, than spirited puppet shows. The notable exception, we learned much later, was the grand Modicut Yiddish puppet theater created by Zuni Maud and Yosi Cutler in New York City.
Plucky was out of tune in the very city that was built with the white pine cut from the forests on the White Earth Reservation. He never attended a reservation government school, and his easy gestures were romantic, but mostly with a sense of irony.
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