Swastika

 

It's a hide painting, one of four the museum displays, and it tells a story, as many hide paintings do. It's always a little trying to tell some visiting fourth graders that Native people had no written language back then--they had language, of course, but no one attempted to write it down, which means, of course, that there are no love letters, no constitutional amendments, no grocery lists, no histories. 

They had to make do, and they did, quite gloriously, as this particular hide painting documents. Their histories are in the drawings. I can't be sure, but I'm quite confident that there is a particular fight here. What we're told is that the story here is The Battle of Twin Buttes. But there wasn't such a thing as the battle of Twin Buttes, not even in a theater near you. 

This hide drawing is not just some imaginative Native artist creating a horror scene-- even though it is a horror scene. A row of cavalry fire their rifles from behind a barrier of some sort and into a village--see the tipis? Significant bloodletting is happening, even women and children, and a baby. There's enough here for us to hazard a guess at what the artist is picturing: it's the Battle of Slim Buttes, the very first fight after Little Big Horn, 1876, this one in the far northwest corner of South Dakota. 

When I'm explaining all of this, trying to be the teacher I once was, some kid will invariably raise a hand. They're all around me, so I grab it and turn to listen. "Were Indians Nazis?" that kid will say, and they'll all go super-attentive.

One of the tipis is decorated with what looks to be an inverted swastika. The "inverted" part they don't get, but what kids, little kids, can't seem to look past is the symbol on tipi the upper left. This is what never fails to grab their attention. 

No, the Lakota were not Nazis, I tell them. What looks like a swastika is really just a symbol of lots of good things--of the joy of changing seasons, of life and love and new babies, of all kinds of blessings. 

I don't know that my answer gets anywhere. The swastika, backward as it may be, sweeps them right off the Plains.  

The swastika--not the Lakota blessings wish--is making a comeback these days, being dragged out of the closet to make shadowy appearances at raucous gatherings to blame Jews for all our problems. Hitler took a perfectly good symbol of good fortune, tipped it slightly, flipped it to be right-facing, and, close to a century later, darling, little fourth-graders still chill when they see one, even if the one they spot is painted on a Lakota tipi and vastly older than the Third Reich or America, for that matter.

And I've got one. I haven't a clue where it came from, honestly. My dad, a WWII vet, spent his service years on a tug in the South Pacific and never came anywhere near Normandy or the Bulge, never saw a German. Dad's gone, and his son is left with the thing. Here it lies, still somehow pulsing hate.

So tell me this. What am I to do with it? 

Do I go online and sell it? I'm sure there's a market for such things, maybe now especially. Even though, right now, I bet I could get top dollar for hate, I'd rather not deal in damnation. 

It has no provenance really, other than the Third Reich. I have no idea where it came from. I can't say some long-gone uncle of mine found it as he followed the front from Normandy to Berlin. I don't know of any relatives that fit that scenario. None of my relatives lived in the Netherlands during the war years.

It doesn't tell a story, other than the big one. I'm guessing I could give it to the museum, but the truth is, they already aren't altogether sure of what to do with the Nazi flotsam and jetsam they already have.

I could simply step outside the burn it, get rid of it with last summer's dead grass, make a ceremony out of it, a private thing. Tell no one, just get rid of it. 

If I'm rid of it, I don't have to think about it, and something in me, something I inherited from Diet Eman and Elie Weisel and a score of others from the literature of the Holocaust: and that is simply "Don't forget."