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 has always been 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