Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Read online

  BLUE RAVENS

  GERALD VIZENOR

  BLUE RAVENS

  — — — — — — — HISTORICAL NOVEL — — — — — — —

  WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

  ››› ‹‹‹

  MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

  WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Middletown CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  © 2014 Gerald Vizenor

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed and typeset in Parkinson Electra

  by Eric M. Brooks

  Wesleyan University Press is a member of the

  Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets

  their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  available upon request

  5 4 3 2 1

  Front cover illustrations: Top: Rick Bartow, Raven’s Dream, pastel on paper, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR. Bottom: “Supports going up after battle…, photograph, c.1917. Image No. 10429058 © Kodak Collection/National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library.

  › IN MEMORY OF IGNATIUS VIZENOR ‹

  AUGUSTUS HUDON BEAULIEU

  ELLANORA BEAULIEU

  JOHN CLEMENT BEAULIEU

  LAWRENCE VIZENOR

  Ignatius Vizenor was born May 4, 1894,

  son of Michael Vizenor and Angeline Cogger,

  on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. He was

  a dapper dresser, wore a fedora, and fought for a nation that

  once inspired natives in the fur trade. The surname Vizenor

  was derived from Vezina in New France. Private Vizenor

  was killed in action on October 8, 1918,

  at Montbréhain, France.

  Ignatius Vizenor was buried at

  Saint Benedict’s Catholic Cemetery on the

  White Earth Reservation. The military coffin was sealed,

  and no one at the funeral could account for his entire remains.

  Thousands of soldiers were harrowed in the soil that

  early autumn at Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne,

  Ardennes, and Picardy in France.

  Raven created the world for his amusement

  and people were the most amusing

  of all animals to him.

  In the Company of Crows and Ravens

  JOHN MARZLUFF, TONY ANGELL

  ››› ‹‹‹

  Blue is not aggressive and violates nothing;

  it reassures and draws together…. The same is

  true in many other languages: bleu, blew, blu, blau

  are reassuring and poetic words that link

  color, memory, desire, and dreams.

  Blue: The History of Color

  MICHEL PASTOUREAU

  ››› ‹‹‹

  The French early gained the utmost

  confidence of the Ojibways, and thereby

  they became more thoroughly acquainted

  with their true and real character, even during the

  comparative short season in which they mingled

  with them as a nation…. The French understood

  their divisions into clans, and treated each clan

  according to the order of its ascendency

  in the tribe.

  History of the Ojibway People

  WILLIAM WARREN

  Today a bird flew near our battery during the chaos.

  It seemed stunned and no wonder when man has so

  upset the order of life. What a blessing will it be

  when mother nature has the running of the

  universe to herself again.

  The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood

  EDITED BY ROBERT H. FERRELL

  ››› ‹‹‹

  Houses are eviscerated like human beings

  and towns like houses. Villages appear in crumpled

  whiteness as though fallen from heaven to earth. The

  very shape of the plain is changed by the frightful heaps

  of wounded and slain…. Turn where you will,

  there is war in every corner of that vastness.

  Under Fire: The Story of a Squad

  HENRY BARBUSSE

  ››› ‹‹‹

  Touching war memorials, and in particular, touching

  the names of those who died, is an important part of

  the rituals of separation … thus testifying that whatever the

  aesthetic and political meanings which they may bear, they

  are also sites of mourning, and of gestures which

  go beyond the limitations of place and time.

  Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

  JAY WINTER

  CONTENTS

  1 ‹ Roman Beaks

  2 ‹ Ogema Station

  3 ‹ Gateway Park

  4 ‹ Carnegie Totems

  5 ‹ Peace Medals

  6 ‹ Peyote Opera

  7 ‹ Blue Horses

  8 ‹ Snow Eggs

  9 ‹ Shadow Draft

  10 ‹ Gas Attack

  11 ‹ Saâcy-Sur-Marne

  12 ‹ Château-Thierry

  13 ‹ Vesle River

  14 ‹ Montbréhain

  15 ‹ Pont des Arts

  16 ‹ Galerie Crémieux

  17 ‹ Deceit of Peace

  18 ‹ Banquet Français

  19 ‹ War Maggots

  20 ‹ Orpheum Theatre

  21 ‹ Mona Lisa

  22 ‹ École Indienne

  23 ‹ Après Guerre

  24 ‹ Mutilés de Guerre

  › 1 ‹

  ROMAN BEAKS

  — — — — — — — 1907 — — — — — — —

  Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu created marvelous blue ravens that stormy summer. He painted blue ravens over the mission church, blue ravens in the clouds, celestial blue ravens with tousled manes perched on the crossbeams of the new telegraph poles near the post office, and two grotesque blue ravens cocked as mighty sentries on the stone gateway to the hospital on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.

  My brother was twelve years old when he first painted the visionary blue ravens on flimsy newsprint. Aloysius was truly an inspired artist, not a student painter. He enfolded the ethereal blue ravens in newsprint and printed his first saintly name on the corner of the creased paper.

  Aloysius Beaulieu, or beau lieu, means a beautiful place in French. That fur-trade surname became our union of ironic stories, necessary art, and our native liberty. Henri Matisse, we discovered later, painted the Nu Bleu, Souvenir de Biskra, or the Blue Nude, that same humid and gusty summer in France.

  The blue ravens were traces of visions and original abstract totems, the chance associations of native memories in the natural world. Aloysius was teased and admired at the same time for his distinctive images of ravens.

  Frances Densmore, the famous ethnomusicologist, attended the annual native celebration and must have seen the visionary totemic blue ravens that summer on the reservation. Her academic studies were more dedicated, however, to the mature traditions and practiced presentations of art and music than the inspirations of a precocious native artist.

  President Theodore Roosevelt, that same year, proposed the Hague Convention. The international limitation of armaments was not sustained by the great powers because several nations united with Germany and vetoed the convention on military arms. The First World War started seven years later, and that wicked crusade would change our world forever.

  Marc Chagall and my brother would be celebrated for their blue scenes and visionary portra
yals. Chagall painted blue dreams, lovers, angels, violinists, donkeys, cities, and circus scenes. He was six years older than my brother, and they both created blue visionary creatures and communal scenes. Chagall declared his vision as an artist in Vitebsk on the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia. Aloysius created his glorious blue ravens about the same time on the Pale of White Earth in Minnesota. He painted blue ravens in new reservation scenes perched over the government school, the mission, hospital, cemetery, and icehouses. Many years later he blued the bloody and desolate battlefields of the First World War in France.

  Chagall and my brother were the saints of blues.

  Aloysius was commended for his godly native talents and artistic portrayals by Father Aloysius Hermanutz, his namesake and the resident priest at Saint Benedict’s Mission. Nonetheless the priest provided my brother with black paint to correct the primary color of the blue ravens. The priest was constrained by holy black and white, the monastic and melancholy scenes and stories of the saints. Black was an absence, austere and tragic. The blues were totemic and a rush of presence. The solemn chase of black has no tease or sentiment. Black absorbed the spirit of natives, the light and motion of shadows. Ravens are blue, the lush sheen of blues in a rainbow, and the transparent blues that shimmer on a spider web in the morning rain. Blues are ironic, the tease of natural light. The night is blue

  not black.

  Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, our cunning and ambitious uncle, overly praised my brother and encouraged his original artistry. Our determined uncle would have painted blue the entire mission, the face of the priest, earnest sisters, the government school and agents. He had provoked the arbitrary authority of federal agents from the very start of the reservation, and continued his denunciations in every conversation. Our uncle easily provided the newsprint for the blue ravens because he was the independent publisher of the Tomahawk, a weekly newspaper on the White Earth Reservation.

  Aloysius never painted any images for the priest, black or blue, or for the mission, and he bravely declined the invitation to decorate the newspaper building with totemic portrayals of blue bears, cranes, and ravens. He understood by intuition that our uncle and the priest would exact familiar representations of creatures, and that would dishearten the natural inspiration of any artist who created a visionary sense of native presence. My brother would never paint to promote newspapers or the papacy.

  Blue ravens roost on the fusty monuments.

  Aloysius was actually a family stray, but he was never an orphan or outcast in the community. He had been abandoned at birth, a newborn ditched at the black mission gate with no name, note, or trace of paternity. My mother secretly raised us as natural brothers because we were born on the same day, October 22, 1895.

  We were born in a world of crucial missions unaware of the Mauve Decade and the Gilded Age and yet we created our own era of Blue Ravens on the White Earth Reservation. That same year of our birth Captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly convicted of treason and dishonored as an artillery officer in France, and Auguste and Louis Lumière set in motion the cinematograph and screened films for the first time at Le Salon Indien du Grand Café at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris.

  Two Benedictine Sisters, Philomene Ketten and Lioba Braun, embraced the forsaken child at the mission gate and named him in honor of the compassionate priest. Aloysius was my brother by heart and memory, by native sentiment, and our loyalty was earned by natural scares, and covert confidence, always more secure as brothers in arms than by the mere count and conceit of our paternal blood descent.

  Father Aloysius was solemn and solicitous in the presence of the boy who would bear his first name, and the name of a saint. The priest was an honorable servant, and he was much adored by the native parishioners of the reservation mission. Yet, to appreciate his consecrated name in the dark eyes of a forsaken native child would never be the same as a ceremonial epithet on a monument or holy façade.

  My mother was not pleased that her second son, my brother by chance, was named in honor of the priest. She respected the priest, the dedication of the sisters, and the mission, but she considered the name too much of a burden on the reservation. The situational caution of that priestly name was soon alleviated, however, when my aunt named her son, born a year earlier, Ignatius. The priestly name was delayed because he was not expected to survive the year. Only then were the honorable namesakes of two priests and two saints acceptable to the mission and to our native families.

  Aloysius was never an easy name to pronounce. The teases and ridicule of his saintly name were constant at the government school, such as, Alley boy, wild son of the mission priest. Mostly the parents of the teasers were members of the Episcopal Church and dedicated critics of the Catholic Mission. Aloysius practiced the artifice of silence and the politics of evasion, similar to the rehearsal of a wise poker player, and he studied the strategies of counter teases. He would pause, turn aside, and declare, “Mostly, the son of tricky saints.” Only the priest, the sisters, and my parents knew that my brother had been abandoned at the mission.

  Aloysius was delivered a second time, in a sense, a few days later at our house near Mission Lake. My mother raised us as twins, nurtured us as a timely union, and taught us to perceive the natural motion of the seasons, and the subtle hues of color in nature. She was an artist at heart and might have painted her children blue and united in flight over the reservation. Those early insights and memories were the start of my natural sense of creation stories and family. We were not the same, of course, natives and brothers are never the same, but we became intimate and loyal friends by experience and confidence. We were driven by the same intense curiosity, by a sense of empathy, wonder, the natural surprise of intuition, and always by the tender tease of our mother. She experienced the world through our adventures, and so she teased every scene, gesture, pose, and story.

  Our parents were born near Bad Medicine Lake, north of Pine Point and west of Lake Itasca, the source of gichiziibi, the Great River, or the Mississippi River. Many generations before the treaty reservation two great native families, and only two, lived on the north and south shores of Bad Medicine Lake.

  Bigiwizigan, or Maple Taffy, the ironic nickname of a dubious native shaman, created stories of mistrust about Bad Medicine Lake because there was no obvious source of the water. The cunning shaman used the mystery of the lake to sway his stories of unease and medicine mastery.

  Bad Medicine, about five miles long, was cold and crystal clear, and the sources of water were natural springs. Our native ancestors created by natural reason the obvious origin stories of the water, and were secure on the north and south shore, the only native families who dared to live near the lake.

  Honoré Hudon Beaulieu, our father, was born on the north shore of Bad Medicine Lake. He was also known as Frenchy. Our mother was born on the south shore of the lake. These two families, descendants of natives and fur traders, shared the resources of the lake and pine forests. My father was private, cautious, but not reticent. He was native by natural reason and disregarded the federal treaty that established the White Earth Reservation. Honoré refused to honor the boundaries and continued to hunt, trap, fish, gather wild rice and maple syrup in the manner of his ancestors.

  Honoré shunned the federal agents.

  Margaret, our mother, was carried in a dikinaagan, or native cradleboard, and remembers the scent and stories of maple syrup. The two families of the lake came together several times a year to share the labor and stories of gathering wild rice and making maple sugar. Our parents met many times at wild rice and sugar camps. More natives were conceived at sugar camps than any other place.

  Honoré was a singer and woodland storier, and in his time created scenes about resistance to federal agents and the native police. He refused to relocate and shunned the summons to receive an assigned allotment of land according to the new policies of the federal government. He was a fur trade hunter and never accepted or obeyed any government. My father continued to hu
nt, fish, and cut timber near Waabigan, Juggler, and Kneebone lakes, as his ancestors had done for many centuries.

  Honoré had earned the veneration of many natives for his resistance to the government, and for his integrity as an independent hunter and trapper. Politicians and federal agents cursed his name, and yet they had never visited or heard his stories. The native police ordered and threatened him several times, but only our mother and the contract of a timber company convinced him to accept an allotment. Our father never located the actual land that was allotted in his name, an arbitrary transaction, but he agreed to move with his pregnant wife to a new house near Mission Lake, and at the same time he was hired by a timber company to cut white pine near Bad Medicine Lake.

  The federal agent selected the new teachers at the government school. Most of the teachers were from Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts in New England. The agent never hired a native teacher. He always wore a black suit, and the teachers were secured in layers of white muslin with creamy flowers. The classroom was unnatural, a drafty box of distractions, the pitch and duty of an awkward hem and haw civilization. The teachers roamed and droned for hours at the chalkboards. The autumn wind soughed with the stories of native shamans in the corridors. Native word players cracked in the cold beams, and the ice woman moaned at the frosted windows. The ice woman murmured seductive stories to lonesome natives in winter, and we were the lonesome ones in school. She whispered a temptation to rest in the snow on the long walk home at night. She gathered the souls of those who were enticed by her treachery.

  The ice woman was a better story than the presidents.

  Every winter day we cracked and moved the thick clear chunks of ice on the schoolroom windows, and pretended to melt the ice woman and other concocted beasts and enemies of natives by warm breath, touch, and natural motion on the windowpane. Sometimes we told stories that the government teacher was the ice woman but we never dared tease her to rest overnight in the snow. Actually we never mentioned the name of the ice woman. Our stories were only about the natives who had been tempted by the ice woman and froze to death.

  The federal agent ridiculed the ice woman stories and blamed the deaths on alcohol. Only the clumsy son of the assistant agent dared to name the teacher as the ice woman. He knew nothing about native stories of shamans or the ice woman. We turned away and shunned the stupid student because natives needed the most creative stories of the ice woman to survive the winter, and we needed even better stories to survive the federal agents and barrels of commodity salt pork.