From the Vault of Art Shay: Independence Day
By Art Shay in News on Jul 6, 2011 3:00PM
Art Shay
In the time of the shameful "paroxysm" of the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1975, I helicoptered down the Grand Canyon to the very bottom of the Havesupi Valley tribal lands. I was on a laudable project for Blue Cross photographing the medical care the organization was rendering to Native Americans.
One of the tatterdemalion shacks served as the shattered home of Dancing Mother,who proudly displayed the American flag that JFK's PR staff had sent her in return for her son's body, buried in bush where he fell defending our military stupidity still engulfing us this 2011 birthday season of our shattered country. The death of our young, a grim heritage that never stops giving. In her son's final cardboard suitcase can be seen a JFK campaign picture that her son, Indian of Iron Heart, had carried into the jungles.
The death telegram is folded in her hand.
Dancing Mother then pointed out that uncurtained left hand window. "He used to swing up to Heaven," he'd say. "I know he's up there now and I will see him again when I go there."
Exactly what the young priests had prompted newly bereft parents of the young victims at Queen of Angels to say, adding, "He used to swing on that swing for hours. I thought my baby was so safe there, an Indian American at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, with our Havesupai gods watching over him." She sighed and I wept with her, but for my own lost son who had recently been murdered in Florida.
"He died," she said. killing him softly, "because he was an American, not because he was an Indian."
"My son died," I said, "because he was a hippie with long hair". My own related fantasy, having long superceded my earliest one of his having been thrown to the Okefenokee alligators as a robbery victim.
"I'm sure our sons will meet in Heaven," she said. I went out to re-board the surrealistic helicopter that had dropped my broken dream into hers, knowing she was as wrong as the young priests at the Queen of Angels.
I think of Broken Mama sometimes when my wife's face clouds up at an old baby picture of Harmon. Or on a day like Monday when our obscene national madness is honored as patriotism.
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