WPT’s Patty Loew and “Way of the Warrior”
The Warrior Ethos and the U.S. Military

that were passing,” Loew said. “I just found it so ironic. Why would these men join the U.S. military voluntarily? I can imagine my grandfather standing up there
taking that military oath to defend the Constitution. And it seemed ludicrous to me. Why would he defend a document that gave him no protection? In fact, that
was an extremely oppressive time for Native people at the turn of the century. There were the boarding schools and a great bloodletting of land. We’re losing our
land. Our children are being forcibly taken from us. The Indian agent — a political appointment who wasn’t Indian — was a patronage job. Every aspect of a
Native person’s life was ruled by an Indian agent including choice of schools. There was the Browning rule that gave complete and utter authority to decide
where an Indian child would be educated to the Indian agent and not to the parents. This was just an awful time. It was probably the worst time since the
original encounter and dealing with epidemics and diseases. Yet here were all of these men volunteering. I just thought it was ironic.”
      Loew had to find out why. So at pow wows across Wisconsin, Loew interviewed Native veterans to find out about their experiences and gain their
perspectives. She found it so fascinating that she obtained a small research grant and began to comb the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
“In the World War I section, I was looking at film on a little six inch screen in a darkened room,” Loew recalled. “I kept seeing this little tin of film that was
unmarked. After the third day, I finally popped it into the machine. The first thing I saw was my grandfather’s infantry flag. It was a training camp film from the
National Guard in 1916. And it’s my grandfather’s unit that is training to go fight Poncho Villa on the Mexican border. It looked like it never had gone through a
projector. I went ‘Whoa, this is really interesting.’ These were primarily Native soldiers training, bayonet lunging and stuff. I thought it was good stuff.”
      Then word started getting around the family on what Loew was looking into. “A cousin said ‘I heard your dad did this documentary about Native Americans in
the military,’” Loew said. “’I have these negatives.’ It looked as if someone is blowing a bugle. It had never been developed. So I had them developed. And
again, the film was in pristine condition. It looked as if it had been shot last week. And it was all these great photos of Native American soldiers on the Mexican
border. It’s primarily a Native unit. Some were of my grandfather and all of these photos I hadn’t seen. I was thinking it was a great resource.”
      And then her mother gave her an audio interview of her grandfather that her mother had done back in 1979. Her grandfather’s spirit was making itself felt in
the project.
      Loew’s assistant went to the National Archive to collect materials for the project, came across a signal corps film and brought it back to Loew. “She came
back with one roll of signal corps film of the 128th in 1918,” Loew recalled. “There are 11 minutes of total video on it. The first 9-10 minutes is 14,000 Red Arrow
guys goose stepping in front of Pershing. They look like ants and you can’t make out anything. And then there are a couple of shots of guys standing in a mess
line at a mess hall. There are no identifiable soldiers in that. And then there are two shots of guys playing football and a baseball game. Again they are just sort
of ants. And then there are two identifiable shots of individual soldiers whom you could identify. One of them is a pitcher pitching the ball and it cuts away to a
soldier hitting the ball and running to first base. That soldier was my grandfather. There are 14,000 soldiers and 11 minutes of film and the six second shot is
clearly my grandfather. He always had this habit of sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. I showed it without saying anything to anyone at a holiday
gathering. And my aunts started to cry and everyone was chattering ‘Grandpa.’”
      “It was spooky when I saw the film from the National Archive,” Loew continued. “It was spooky in a really comforting way. Initially it was spooky and then I
thought ‘How blessed am I to have this family resource and what a good story to tell.”
What pushed Loew over the edge to include her grandfather in the documentary was a discovery her cousin made when cleaning out Loew’s aunt’s attic after
she had died. “She found an envelope in a trunk that she wanted me to see,” Loew said. “And she gave it to me at Indian Summer. Inside was the diary that my
grandfather wrote from the front, but none of us knew it existed. It was at that point I said ‘This is probably the best documented World War I soldier, much less a
Native soldier, probably the only Native soldier who has been documented at all, much less to this extent.’ And it was my grandfather. I had to tell the story in
spite of all of my hesitation.”
      Loew’s grandfather was following in the way of the warriors, who were the most respected people in Native American nations. “So many of our ceremonies
begin or end with some sort of participation by someone who is a warrior, someone who has seen combat, usually in the U.S. military,” Loew said. “And there are
all of these ceremonies where you can only perform this part of the ceremony if you are a veteran. Those men and women who have had that experience are
really revered. They have extremely high status in their communities. And if you want a leadership role in your tribal government, in many communities, being a
veteran is part of the resume that you ought to be carrying into your campaign to win that election.”
      And it is this warrior ethos that Loew feels has been used by the U.S. military since Europeans first came to North America. “Early on, tribes looked at these
European rivals and thought they could use them to neutralize their traditional enemies and make alliances with them,” Loew said. “At the same time,
Europeans were using their Indian allies to further their own goals in trade, whether it was the English, the French or the Dutch. And so, Native people who knew
the terrain were used as trackers and scouts. And because they knew the terrain, the French, the English and the Dutch bestowed these superhuman warrior
powers on them. Thus begins this stereotype that these are bloodthirsty savages and they can see in the dark and they can speak volumes from a single bent
blade of grass. You can trace all of these crazy stereotypes that you can trace right from those earliest encounters.”
      By the time of Wounded Knee, about the only place where Native Americans could fulfill their warrior ethos — proving one’s leadership by protecting the
community — was through the U.S. military. It was an unequal match, a Native American need that was exploited by the military.
      And at the advent of World War I, the combination of the warrior ethos and the stereotypes that Euro-Americans — and sometimes Native people — had
toward Native soldiers meant hazardous service for the Native soldiers. “Sometimes Native people were pushed to the frontlines and sometimes no,” Loew said. “I
talked to a lot of Native Americans who said they volunteered to walk point. They volunteered for long-range reconnaissance. They volunteered for the 82nd
Airborne Division of Special Forces or Green Berets because their people were good at that sort of thing. I remember talking to one vet saying ‘But you grew up
in a housing project in Philadelphia. Why did you think you had any better tracking skills?’ But it was that sort of chest pumping ‘my people are warriors’ frame of
mind. There’s a fair measure of that, Native people truly believing they are better at that sort of thing, buying into this stereotype. And then there is also the U.S.
military pushing them into those roles because of a ‘Those guys know what they are doing’ mentality. ‘We’re all safer if that guy is out front because he’s an
Indian. His people know how to track and scout. We’ll be safe with him.’”
Patty Loew on the set of the Wisconsin Public
Television show “In Wisconsin,” which she
produces and co-hosts.
      By Jonathan Gramling

      Part 1 of 2

      It was memories of her grandfather, who had been a part of Pershing’s Expeditionary Force that pursued
Pancho Villa into Mexico around 1916 and later fought in Europe during World War I that led Patty Loew,
a producer for Wisconsin Public Television and co-host of “In Wisconsin, to consider making a
documentary about Native American soldiers and the U.S. military. But it was perhaps the spirit of her
grandfather that guided her in the making of the documentary “Way of the Warrior” and “insisted” that he be
an intricate part of the documentary.
      Loew, who presented “Way of the Warrior” at a Race & Media event sponsored by The Center for
Democracy in Action at Edgewood College on June 16, spoke to The Capital City Hues about the film in
the offices of WPT in Vilas Hall about the documentary and her fascination with her grandfather and other
Native American soldiers who fought for the U.S. even though they were not U.S. citizens.
At first, while she was motivated by memories of her grandfather, Loew, due to professional reasons, was not
going to include her father’s story in the documentary. But his spirit kept cropping up.
      “I found out that officially another 12,000 Natives enlisted although there were probably many more