Today, the Thunderbird's annual powwow, performance, and auction raise critical scholarship money for Indian students. As adults, the Little Eagles transformed themselves into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers. Each member had a very distinct and different cultural background and as a group they were determined to first learn and preserve the songs and dances of their own tribes and then to branch out to include those of other tribes. The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers traces its roots back to a group of teenagers called the Little Eagles, which included director Louis Mofsie. The siblings are members of the Nakota Nation and grew up on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The episode also features the Native American blues-rock group "Indigenous," which consists of three brothers, Mato Nanji (vocals and guitar), Pte (bass), Horse (percussion), and their sister, Wanbdi (drums, vocals). The male dancers are Louis Mofsie (Hopi/Winnebago) and Michael Taylor (Delaware). This episode of Native America contains a performance by members of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, the first piece features two female dancers and the second, two male - in both one dancer does traditional Native dance while the other does improvisational dance. Performances in the Circle at AICH were videotaped, edited, and aired on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network in half hour segments. Our thanks to Michael Gonzales, curator of the 45th Infantry Division Museum, Oklahoma City, Okla., for additional research.For several years the American Indian Community House (AICH) produced a cable network show titled Native America. Mauldin went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, but, says DePastino, Billie remained a hero throughout his life. Mauldin had never gone to college, but Billie, the Choctaw career soldier, had taken a course on pictorial satire at the University of Oklahoma. Billie introduced Mauldin to the works of the English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) and the French caricaturist Honore Daumier (1803– 1879). According to Mauldin’s biographer Todd DePastino, “Rayson Billey was the biggest, meanest soldier you could imagine, and yet he was also one of the most educated, intellectual men Mauldin had ever met.” The sergeant taught Mauldin the ways of army life, but he also encouraged Mauldin’s cartooning. Less well-known is that Mauldin modelled Willie after a Choctaw friend and mentor, Sgt. Army, and Mauldin’s soldiers became the face of the American fighting man. In 1943, the cartoons were picked up by Stars and Stripes, the famous independent newspaper for the entire U.S. Just 18 when he joined the Arizona National Guard in 1940, Mauldin began drawing one-panel cartoons for the 45th Division News, featuring two haggard, unshaven G.I.s, Willie and Joe. Among its famous recruits was Bill Mauldin (1921–2003), the cartoonist who later won two Pulitzer Prizes. The 45th Division also made a lasting contribution to American popular culture. On April 29, 1945, the 45th Division liberated Dachau Concentration Camp, and directly witnessed the horrors inflicted by the Nazis in the “Final Solution.” For the 511 days to the end of the war, the Division made amphibious landings, at Massena, Salerno and Anzio, and fought its way through Italy, France and Germany. On July 10, 1943, it participated in the invasion of Sicily. The 45th prepared for war by training in Louisiana and at Fort Sill, Okla., Camp Berkeley, Texas, Fort Devens, Mass., Pine Camp in New York and Camp Pickett in Virginia. Three of the handful of Congressional Medals of Honor that American Indians received in World War II were awarded to soldiers in the 45th: Ernest Childers, Jack Montgomery, an Oklahoma Cherokee and classmate of Childers at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, and Van T. The 45th was now known as the Thunderbird Division.Īmerican Indian soldiers more than lived up to the name. Army abandoned the shoulder patch in the 1930s and, after a competition, replaced it with another Indian symbol, the Thunderbird. The four-armed yellow insignia on a square background of red had deep roots in the Native southwest, but, in a nasty case of cultural misappropriation, the rising Nazi Party of Germany adopted the symbol for its standard, the swastika. According to the 45th Division history, “For the first 15 years of its existence, members of the 45th Infantry Division proudly wore on their left shoulders an ancient American Indian symbol of good luck,” as recognition of the great number of Natives who proudly served in it. Encompassing many tribal homelands, its ranks included many American Indians, as well as cowboys, and the Division was always conscious of its Native heritage.
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