Patriotic Gifts

This chapter looks at these interracial interactions from the point of view of Indians in an effort at writing a historical anthropology of Indian patriotism. At the core of Indians' military participation and commemoration of the Great War, the practice of giving, to non-Indians or to Indians, to outsiders or to insiders, to family members or to complete strangers, structured the expression of patriotism in Indian communities. Examining Memorial and Armistice Days, in particular, this chapter looks at the role these holidays played in allowing Indians to maintain boundaries with their white neighbors and develop a series of adaptations of patriotic symbols and ceremonies that acclimatized patriotism for reservation life on an unprecedented scale.

The Names of Local Heroes

This chapter emphasizes the significance of the war in rearranging relations between races at the local level. In a colonial spirit of “closing the frontier,” settlers living on or near Indian reservations appropriated Indian military participation. When raising funds for monuments or creating local heroes, whites invoked a brotherhood-in-arms and celebrated the true end of the Indian wars. Indians took advantage of their neighbors' willingness to include them in their celebrations and reactivated memories and heroes of the pre-reservation era. However, the war monuments that memorialized the dead Indian heroes on several reservations often did little else but list their names and dates of service. But their very existence resulted from a complex struggle in which tribes, bands, chiefs and chiefs' descendants, town notables, and white and Indian elites tried to appropriate for themselves the national legitimacy that military sacrifice carried.

A Dream of Emancipation

This chapter shows how the contradictions and frustrations surrounding veterans came to a head with the onset of the “Indian New Deal” initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Indian commissioner, John Collier. As Collier pushed his agenda of reform and return to communal landholding on Indian reservations, patriotism became the privileged weapon of an active minority of veterans spearheading resistance to the New Deal. Moreover, World War II proved a very favorable moment to realize a rhetorical and organizational connection that linked patriotism, the conservative defense of Indians' civic rights, and the rising tide of termination. At the end of the 1940s, the World War I generation reached the peak of its influence in Indian country and demonstrated the complexity of Indian patriotism. A new generation of Indian soldiers was soon to take their place. They would turn ceremonies popularized with World War I into a new, modern Indian tradition.

Bad Boys, Forgotten Heroes

This chapter switches perspective again and takes as its object the veterans themselves. When looked at through an ethnographical lens, World War I veterans appear to have been ambiguous heroes on reservations. They were honored but at the same time elicited mistrust, jealousy, and attempts on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as on the part of their own communities, to control and direct their behavior. Honoring veterans was an opportunity to reaffirm community bonds and bolster Indians' status vis-à-vis whites. But celebrations could also be rituals to manage fears and distrust toward the veterans themselves. Thus, their identity as a group developed as much from local cultural traditions as from this ambivalent position on reservations, alternately central and marginal.

Back in History?

This chapter considers how the story of Indian participation proved unwieldy to all who could have been interested in recounting it. While documentation was produced and sometimes published, neither the federal government nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), nor the states, nor even anthropologists displayed an interest in looking at the war experience or investigating its effects on Indian veterans and communities. With rare exceptions, these actors treated war as a parenthesis, albeit one that proved that the Indians were not dead and that they could contribute to national life. Indian activists, especially in the cities, turned out to be the only ones interested in capitalizing on the war to push for a national holiday that would pay tribute to the Native American contribution: Indian Day.

Introduction

This introductory chapter summarizes the Native American soldiers' position both during and after World War I. It also briefly captures the premise of this volume: that Indian patriotism, mandated by whites or claimed by Natives themselves, was neither inevitable nor in any way obvious. The chapter argues that patriotism, for Indians as for non-Indians, was the product of historical contingencies and a mixture of contradictory projects and motivations that each individual had to make sense of on their own. Patriotism tested, shaped, and was shaped by families, reservation communities, and urban Indian organizations in inter- and intra-generational dialogues. And because it was heavily constrained and influenced by non-Natives as well, it was also the product of interracial interactions and conversations.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter considers the results of the changes that took place between 1917 and the onset of the termination movement. During this time, World War I had made it possible to claim U.S. patriotism on an unprecedented scale. Whether one looks at the number of Indian veterans, their level of political organization, or the sustained mobilization of patriotic arguments on the local and national scene by Indians on or off reservations, there can be no doubt that something changed in 1917. Change, however, needed people to happen. It was not enough that Indians joined the armed forces without a major rebellion and demonstrated their loyalty on the battlefields of France. Their loyalty had to be noted, publicized, celebrated, and memorialized by them and by others. It had to be interpreted.

Patriotic Rewards, New Freedoms

This chapter applies the insights of the previous chapters to the examination of the role of patriotism and veterans in shaping Indian policy from the 1920s. It shows how, for veterans and non-veterans alike, Native American participation in World War I was an opportunity to ask the state and the general public for moral and material recognition. Although they derived few tangible benefits from this mobilization, the ability of veterans to claim the attention of non-Indians allowed them to accumulate a level of political savvy and social capital rarely encountered in their communities. The 1920s were a testing time for Native patriots and a testing ground for a new strategy. In the process, they asked troubling questions: Could Indians be freed from BIA supervision? And with what consequences? Patriotism suggested new answers to what was, after all, the core of the “Indian problem.”