The All-Nations Native American Veterans Memorial in Jefferson, Oregon
My stepfather's brother died with other marines on the beach at Guadalcanal during World War II.
My best high school friend was killed in the early days of the Vietnam War.
These men are being honored today at Memorial Day ceremonies along with nearly a million of their soldier, sailor, marine, coast guard and air force compatriots who gave their lives in military service. No distinction will be made between the hundreds of thousands who died fighting in wars most Americans would consider righteous and the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the furtherance of bad causes or died in vain because their criminal or reckless leaders sent them into harm's way for greed, stupidity or empire. Those who fought in gray uniforms in a war of secession are given the same reverence, the same moments of silence, the same commemoration of sacrifice as those who wore blue into battle.
It doesn’t matter whether they were white soldiers from the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment who fell in the land-grabbing war with Mexico in 1847, or black soldiers of the 93rd Infantry Division fighting Germans in the war to end all wars, or Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team slugging their way through Italy while their relatives lived incarcerated in camps back home.
It doesn’t matter whether their name was Hernández or Hansen or Hashimoto. Nor whether they caught enemy shrapnel or a bullet from friendly fire. Nor whether they were drafted or volunteered. Nor whether they died fighting for liberty more than 200 years ago at Bunker Hill or crushing it more than 100 years ago in the boondocks of the Philippines. On Memorial Day all American warriors who lost their lives are honored because they did lose their lives.
With one exception.
My great-great-great-great-great uncle was killed by U.S. soldiers during the Second Seminole War. Other distant relatives were killed during the Third Seminole War. Killed for trying to hold onto freedom, land, the right to self-determination.
Whether they killed warriors and women on the banks of the Pease River in Texas, the Washita River in Kansas, Sand Creek in Colorado, or Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota; whether they fought Shawnee in Indiana, Asakiwaki in Wisconsin, Lakota and Cheyenne in Montana, Chiricahua and Mescalero in Arizona, Nez Perce in Idaho or Modocs in California, the men in blue who were killed in the Indian Wars are among those who will be honored today.
'Spirit Warriors' honors American Indians who fought at Little Big Horn
~Photo Courtesy of Elly Bookman~
But the thousands of warriors they killed — the ancestors of us "original" Americans — aren’t counted for the ultimately futile but unhesitating sacrifice they made for the freedom of their people. On Memorial Day, they are invisible. Monuments to the Rebel dead can be found in practically every town of the Confederacy. Memorials to Indian resistance are next to non-existent.
Attempts have been made to correct this. In 2002, the 1909 memorial on the Denver Capitol grounds that honored the 22 soldiers killed as they and their compatriots massacred the southern Arapaho and Cheyenne at Sand Creek got a new plaque to replace the original one which labeled that slaughter a Civil War victory for the Union. Twenty-four years ago, after viciously racist verbal attacks from foes of the move, the Custer Battlefield National Monument was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Now, intermixed with the 249 white marble 7th Cavalry gravestones are a double handful of red granite gravestones placed at the site since 1999 for fallen Indian warriors. "Peace through Unity" designed the innovative Indian memorial at the site (in photo).
In the courtyard of the Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art in Phoenix, Arizona, there is the American Indian Veterans National Memorial with figures sculpted by the late Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser and Michael Naranjo of the Santa Clara Pueblo. In Jefferson, Oregon, there is the All Nations Native American Veterans Memorial, a statue originally on the Flathead reservation in Montana. It is the only Indian veterans memorial not on a reservation or at a museum.
In 1994, the Native American Veterans' Memorial Establishment Act was passed. It okayed a memorial, but it could only be constructed inside the National Museum of the American Indian instead of on the Washington Mall with the other war memorials. Out of sight, out of mind. Invisible, the way the PTB and society in general likes to keep Indians, except as stereotypes.
In 2013, Sen. Brian Schatz introduced a bill to amend the 1994 act. It altered the law to permit the National Native American Veterans' Memorial to be built outdoors, though still on the property of the Museum. And it made both the Museum and the National Congress of American Indians responsible for raising the money for the monument instead of making it the sole responsibility of NCAI. But so far there's not even a hint of when that D.C. Memorial will break ground.
Whenever that is, it will only honor those Natives who fought for the U.S.—there are about 200,000 such veterans—not those who fought to keep the right to live as they had before the invasion.
The fact is scores of sites throughout America could display memorial statues commemorating events with succinct plaques: From this site in 17-- or 18--, the Anishinaabe (or Comanche, or Alibamu) were removed to reservations in ------- after 50 (or 120, or 350) of their number were killed in a surprise attack by the U.S. soldiers, some of whom cut off breasts or scrotums for use as trophies and tobacco pouches. Their lands were turned over to settlers, miners and railroad builders and the city/town of ------ was built on their burial grounds.
One of about a dozen red granite headstones of
Lakota and Cheyenne who died at Little Big Horn
in 1876. These have been added since 1999.
Today, when the nation's war dead are remembered, when we are supposed to put aside political and ethnic divisions for a few moments of introspection, many of our politicians still won’t take a break from the lies—past and current lies—for which too many men and women went prematurely into the ground. Today, we will hear plenty from many politicians about liberty, freedom and sacrifice associated with American wars, but nothing about the plunder, rapine and imperial machinations associated with some of those wars, the Mexican War, the Philippines War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and, of course, the Indian Wars.
Let me be crystal clear. I'm for moving ahead, for transcendence, Indians and non-Indians alike. We live in the 21st Century, and people alive now bear no responsibility and should carry no guilt for what was done more than a century or two ago.
But today is Memorial Day, memory day, and, just as we do not forget the soldiers who froze at Valley Forge or took bullets at Fort Wagner or were blown up at Khe Sanh, there is no excuse for the nation to retreat into convenient amnesia and forget the deaths of those who resisted the theft and genocide led by leaders masquerading as divinely inspired messengers of freedom in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Until the nation remembers all its dead warriors, you’ll pardon me if my Memorial Day reverence is tempered with rage.
