Provided by Patty Loew
Assoc. Professor, UW-Madison
Dept. Life Sciences Communication
Producer of the PBS documentary - "Way of the Warrior"

I have wanted to tell this story for twenty years. As with many Native storytellers, it grew out of my own family experience.  My grandfather, Edward DeNomie, was one of 12,000 American Indians who enlisted in World War I.  I always imagined him, as a new recruit, standing with his hand raised, as all inductees do, swearing an oath to defend the Constitution. How ironic, I thought, since he and many of the other Native soldiers were not U.S. citizens and had no protections under the Constitution.

As I traveled Indian Country and asked veterans why they enlisted—and the vast majority did enlist—the answers they gave were varied and complex.  Some enlisted because of economic need. Others said they were looking for opportunity. Some wanted adventure.  But many others cited a desire to protect their nation—their Indian nation, not the U.S. per se. One vet told me that his tribe had signed a peace and friendship treaty with the U.S. in 1827 and even though the U.S. had broken every treaty it ever signed with his nation, his people were still honoring their treaty obligations.

Desert Storm and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rekindled my interest in the topic.  The death of Hopi soldier, Lori Piestewa, also motivated me to try to make this documentary. I applied for grants and was successful in acquiring funds for a one-hour program, not the two-hour program I envisioned.  There are so many compelling stories left untold.

I never intended for the program to get as genealogical as it did. I began in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which has one of the most significant film collections in the country. I explored the WWI collection to see if there were enough resources to begin with that war. As I checked the reels, I saw an unmarked canister of film. My curiosity grew after several days of searching and I finally put it in the projector.  It was a Wisconsin National Guard training film shot at Camp Douglas, Wisconsin, dated June, 1916. The very first thing I saw was my grandfather’s infantry unit’s flag, the very month he trained there.

As time went on and the project developed, strange serendipitous things started happening.  A cousin gave me an envelope of negatives, never printed, that turned out to be film my grandfather shot along the Mexican Border. His unit, tasked with fighting Pancho Villa, was stationed there in 1916.  I thought the photographs would be useful, but was still uncomfortable with telling a personal story. A year later, my mother handed me audio tape containing an interview she and my brother had done with my grandfather in 1979, the year before he walked on. In it, he talked about going to France and fighting in all seven battles in which the U.S. participated. In 2005, at a family reunion at Milwaukee’s Indian Summer Festival, a cousin in California handed me package and said, “I heard you were doing a documentary.  I really think you need to see this.”  Inside was my grandfather’s diary—a journal he kept while fighting on the front lines—a diary, none of us in Wisconsin knew existed.  The training film, the photos, the audio interview, the diary—it was clear that my grandfather really wanted to be in this documentary!

It was also clear to me that there was perhaps no better documented Native soldier in WWI, perhaps no better chronicled doughboy period! And I realized that Edward DeNomie’s story was the story of most Native soldiers who fought in WWI.  He was recruited out of an Indian boarding school. He served in the front lines, as Indians often did, part of the military’s effort to create “shock” troops.  He was wounded by shrapnel and lost part of a lung in a poison gas attack.

The themes that surfaced in my grandfather’s story are familiar to us as Native people—boarding schools, assimilation, allotment, citizenship, stereotypes—but they are not themes you’ll find in books or films about military history.

And I think they should be.

Native Americans disproportionately serve the U.S. military.  They disproportionately receive the most dangerous assignments.  And they disproportionately die in combat. Stereotypes, both imposed and assumed, are part of the reason. Stereotypes have consequences.

As a group, Native Americans are some of the most decorated soldiers in history.  They have been awarded Purple Hearts, Silver Stars, and Medals of Honor, but their stories are largely untold.

That is what this documentary is about: an exploration of the meaning of military service for Native soldiers, the consequences of stereotypes in higher casualty rates and higher incidences of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and through individual stories a broader understanding of 20th life seen through the lens of Native American veterans. This is a program that honors the warriors.  It does not honor war.

The issue of PTSD is particularly compelling, I think.  Nearly every Native community I visited understands the psychological toll war takes on those who fight it and has ceremonies to help returning veterans transition from the killing fields to their peacetime communities. Many purify their veterans, understanding how that not only might help the individual soldier re-integrate, but also protect the community from, as a Hopi elder described it, the “poison” of war.  That, to me, is something mainstream America would do well to consider. We will have tens of thousands of veterans returning to us from Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we prepared to help heal their wounded spirits?

I’ve always thought that storytelling through film and video is culturally consistent with who we are as Native people, a logical expression of the oral tradition. Our stories reflect our struggles, our triumphs, our philosophies, our world views. The stories we tell are our gift to the next generation. Through them, they’ll learn who we were and what we valued. And maybe they’ll learn more about who they are.