Search results for ""Author Tom Holm""

The United States government thought it could make Indians "vanish." After the Indian Wars ended in the 1880s, the government gave allotments of land to individual Native Americans in order to turn them into farmers and sent their children to boarding schools for indoctrination into the English language, Christianity, and the ways of white people. Federal officials believed that these policies would assimilate Native Americans into white society within a generation or two. But even after decades of governmental efforts to obliterate Indian culture, Native Americans refused to vanish into the mainstream, and tribal identities remained intact. This revisionist history reveals how Native Americans' sense of identity and "peoplehood" helped them resist and eventually defeat the U.S. government's attempts to assimilate them into white society during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Tom Holm discusses how Native Americans, though effectively colonial subjects without political power, nonetheless maintained their group identity through their native languages, religious practices, works of art, and sense of homeland and sacred history. He also describes how Euro-Americans became increasingly fascinated by and supportive of Native American culture, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. In the face of such Native resiliency and non-Native advocacy, the government's assimilation policy became irrelevant and inevitably collapsed. The great confusion in Indian affairs during the Progressive Era, Holm concludes, ultimately paved the way for Native American tribes to be recognized as nations with certain sovereign rights.

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The gripping, forgotten tale of Ira Hayes-a Native American icon and World War II legend that spent the latter half of his life haunted by being a war hero. IRA HAYES tells the story of Ira Hamilton Hayes from the perspective of a Native American combat veteran of the Vietnam generation. Hayes, along with five other Marines, was captured in Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of raising the stars and stripes on Mount Suribachi during the battle for the Japanese Island of Iwo Jima. The photograph was the inspiration and model for the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington. Between the time he helped raise that flag and his death-and beyond-he was the subject of more newspaper columns than any other Native person. He was hailed as a hero and maligned as a chronic alcoholic unable to take care of himself. IRA HAYES will explore these fluctuating views of Ira Hayes. It will reveal that they were primarily the product of American misconceptions about Native people, the nature of combat, and even alcoholism. Like most surviving veterans of combat, Ira did not think of himself as a heroic figure. There can be no doubt that Ira suffered from PTSD, which is a compound of survivor's guilt, the shock of seeing death, especially of one's friends, and the isolation brought on by feeling that no one could understand what he had been through. Ira's life has been a subject of two motion pictures and a television drama. All these dramas sympathize with him, but ultimately fail to see his binge drinking as his way of temporarily escaping the melancholy, the rage he felt, his sense of betrayal, and the sheer boredom of peacetime. IRA HAYES breaks apart the complexities of Ira's short life in honor of all Native veterans who have been to war in the service of the United States. This is equally their story.

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