Читать книгу Native Tributes - Gerald Vizenor - Страница 9

‹| 3 |›

TOMBSTONE BONUS

The United States Congress passed the World War Adjustment Act on Monday, May 19, 1924. Five years and hundreds of promises after the armistice of the First World War, and hardly anyone noticed the war bonus legislation that most veterans turned down. The Bonus Act provided only limited loans, not a real bonus of cash, and the loans would be deducted with interest from final cash payment in some twenty years.

The Indian Citizenship Act was passed two weeks later, one more overdue bonus. Reservation natives were declared citizens of the United States of America. The act was ironic, of course, and with no trace of remorse. The provisions of citizenship would not “in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” The white pine stumps, dams, and flooded wild rice beds were the ironic provisions of “other property.”

The Bonus Act empowered tricky loans, and was rightly named the Tombstone Bonus because most natives would probably be dead by the time the government dealt with payments. Most veterans were on the road in search of a meal and a place to live and work years before the Great Depression, and on federal reservations most natives were the designated prisoners of poverty.

The United States Veterans Bureau was directed to deliver the Adjusted Service Certificates of the Bonus Act on the birthdate of each veteran, the pretense of a money gift. Government policies were seldom explained, and the reason certificates were delivered on the birthdays of veterans remained a great mystery.

White Earth Reservation veterans waited and waited to compare the birthday certificates. My certificate arrived two months after my birthday. Aloysius never received one, and later we learned the document had been delivered by mistake to Aloysius Hermanutz, the principal priest at Saint Benedict’s Mission.

John Clement Beaulieu, my cousin, who had served with the combat engineers, raised a stink that the certificates were one more hoax of federal agents, and the government ruse became a game to create the most outrageous stories of the delayed secret birthday certificates.

Certificate names were erased in bright light.

Certificates arrived only on cloudy days.

Parchment certificates were used as ledgers.

Certificates were shunted in cattle cars.

The Ice Woman lured the delivery agents.

Hungry packs of mongrels ate the certificates.

Certificates were traded for white lightning.

Certificates were treaties held in trust.

Certificates were no better than land allotments.

My crafty bonus certificate was delivered on a cloudy afternoon, and with my name and the exact amount clearly printed on the parchment paper, but the provisions of the take back loan with interest were hard to read in the fine print. Truly, the great government hoaxers had prepared a late birthday Tombstone Bonus.

IT IS HEREBY CERTIFIED that pursuant to The World War Adjustment Act and in conformity with the laws of the United States, the amount named, FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE Dollars, less any indebtedness including interest, lawfully incurred and due hereon, shall become due and payable on the first day of January 1945, to Basile Hudon Beaulieu, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota.

The certificate was payable after my fiftieth birthday, and the money would have lost value in that time, and most veterans were angry and rejected the deceit of a puny loan provided by the Tombstone Bonus.

The bonus was one more withered promise.

Dummy waved with the diva puppets in hand and the mongrels bayed on the platform that morning we departed from the Ogema Station for Washington. My brother had waited for me some twenty years ago to board the train for the first time to visit art museums in Minneapolis, the second departure from the station was our military muster to the war in France, the third was our search 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.