Aloysius accepted the crown of chance, an uncertain destiny and saintly name, and became a soldier and artist in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. We served together as scouts in the same division and infantry regiment, and survived the unbearable memories of shattered blue faces in the brush, broken bodies, small bare bones in the muck, and solitary tremors of hands and hearts in the ruins of war. The eyes of soldiers at the end turned hoary with no trace of rage, sense of solemn touch, shimmer of blood, or praise of irony.
We were brothers on the reservation, brothers in the bloody blue muck of the trenches, slow black rivers, brick shambles of farms and cities, brothers of the untold dead at gruesome stations. Bodies were stacked by the day for a wretched roadside funeral in the forest ruins. We were steadfast brothers on the road of lonesome warriors, a native artist and writer ready to transmute the desolation of war with blue ravens and poetic scenes of a scary civilization and native liberty.
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The Italian Aloysius of Gonzaga, a sixteenth-century saint, was castle born and encouraged by his mighty father to become a soldier. He was a warrior only in name. Aloysius the original renounced his inheritance to become a priest and vowed chastity, poverty, and obedience, a comely ritual of conceit, monotheistic separation, and ancestral agony.
Father Aloysius Hermanutz was born in the ancient Kingdom of Württemberg in 1853. He studied to become a Benedictine priest and dedicated his godly service and obedience to the care, conversion, and education of natives for some fifty years at Saint Benedict’s Mission on the White Earth Reservation. Aloysius, my brother, continues his saintly name in the marvelous artistry of a painter, not in the doctrines of monotheism, obedience, and the noticeable pain of priestly courtesy.
Saint Aloysius envisioned his own death at age twenty-three on June 21, 1591. Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu was drafted with me and other native relatives at the very same age and in the same month some three centuries later as ordinary infantry soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War.
The chance connections of soldiers and saints.
Ignatius Vizenor and many of our other cousins enlisted or were drafted that same summer to serve as soldiers in the ironic name of the Great War. Ignatius was the namesake of Father Ignatius Tomazin, and more notably of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Ignatius, our cousin, was the firstborn of Michael and Angeline Vizenor. He was raised with four brothers and two sisters. Joseph, the last born, was elected many years later as the manager of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe in Minnesota. Ignatius and his brother Lawrence, who was a year younger, were privates in the American Expeditionary Forces in France.
The Beaulieu and Vizenor families praised and raised large godly families, a legacy of the fur trade and that premier native union with spirited descendants of New France. The families were mostly devout but they became cautious Roman Catholics after the First World War and the Great Depression. Absolute devotion to a church or a saint was more uncertain after the massive death and destruction of an unspeakable world war and the absolute desperation of extreme poverty.
Many native fur trade families came together with new and obscure traditions, the union of blood and treasure to honor and defend France. A disproportionate number of natives enlisted and others were drafted to serve in the military, and their reservation families invested in patriotic war bonds to cover the cost of the American Expeditionary Forces.
Peter Vizenor, or Vezina, and Sophia Trotterchaud raised fourteen children, including Abraham, Henry, and Michael who married Angeline Cogger. Peter was a native hunter and fur trader at the time the reservation was established in 1868. Two of their children married and raised twenty more children. Abraham Vizenor and Margaret Fairbanks, for instance, raised five boys and six girls on the reservation. Henry Vizenor and Alice Mary Beaulieu raised nine children on the reservation and then the family moved to Minneapolis at the end of the Great Depression.
Clement Hudon Beaulieu and Elizabeth Farling raised ten children and were removed by the federal government from Old Crow Wing to the new White Earth Reservation. Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, the firstborn, founded and was publisher of the Progress, and later the Tomahawk, the first weekly newspapers published on the reservation. Clement Hudon Beaulieu, the eighth child and namesake of his father, became a priest in the Episcopal Church. Charles Hudon Beaulieu served in the Civil War and was promoted from private to captain in the Ninth Minnesota Volunteers. Theodore Basile Beaulieu, the youngest of the ten children, married three times and raised six children with his first wife Anne Charette, two children with his second wife Maggie Pemberton, and four children with his third wife Anna Tanner.
These first native families of the fur trade and the reservation begot a new nation, and their sons and daughters served with honor and distinction in every war elected, concocted, and declared by politicians in two centuries. Most native soldiers were born on federal reservations, served with others in integrated companies, and were not yet recognized as citizens at the time of the First World War. Natives of the fur trade served to save one of the nations of their ancestors. France established many war memorials, but never a memorial to honor the natives of the fur trade.
Ignatius of Loyola was the mastermind of the Society of Jesus, otherwise named the Jesuits. Basque born more than four centuries ago he waived nobility, his knightly fortune, and by vows of poverty and chastity became a hermit, priest, and theologian. Ignatius was inspired by many reported visions of the saints, sacred adventures, and holy figures, and these marvelous ethereal contests in his dreams determined the stories of his divine service. He was canonized and declared the patron saint of soldiers.
Ignatius Vizenor was never secure with a saintly name.
Father Ignatius Tomazin was the first priest delegated by the abbot of Saint John’s Abbey to establish a mission at the White Earth Reservation. Federal policy at the time favored the mercy and politics of the Episcopal Church over the secretive papacy of Rome. Father Tomazin was a testy immigrant from Ljubljana, Slovenia, with a great vision of political resistance, and he spoke the language of the native Anishinaabe. He was provoked and criticized by Lewis Stowe, the nasty federal agent, who had been appointed by the Episcopal bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple. Stowe was actually the agent of the bishop, not the federal government, and he maligned Father Tomazin.
The Catholic natives on the reservation defended the mission priest and united to resist the arbitrary authority of the agent and the policies of the federal government to designate a minority religious functionary.
Father Ignatius Tomazin, in February 1879, accompanied a delegation of five principal native leaders, Wabanquot, or White Cloud, the head chief, Mashakegeshig, Munedowu, Shawbaskung, and Hole in the Day, the younger, to discuss the crucial issues of native liberty on the White Earth Reservation with federal officials in Washington.
Father Tomazin was eventually removed from the White Earth Reservation because he rightly goaded the federal agents and chosen Episcopalians. The feisty priest protected native political liberty. Some thirty years later he served as the pastor of a church in Albany, Minnesota. Tragically the nasty parishioners of that mingy and disagreeable community challenged the priest, beat and cursed him in the parish house, and chased him out of town. Father Tomazin, then in his seventies, was badly wounded in spirit, and deceived by his own resistance, wandered to Chicago and “jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a hotel,” according to the New York Times, August 27, 1916.
Ignatius, our coy, courteous, and elegant cousin would not survive the saintly names or priestly patronage. He was