Warriors of a Broken Nation: Why Native People Still Fight for the Flag That Took Their Land
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
Indigenous participation in the armed forces of settler states seems, at first glance, paradoxical. Why would Native people fight under flags that flew over massacres, expropriations of land, and campaigns of cultural erasure? Yet from the American Revolution to current deployments, American Indians, Alaska Natives, First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Indigenous peoples of Mexico have served at strikingly high rates. The Smithsonian’s exhibition and book Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces documents more than 250 years of Native service and emphasizes that enlistment draws on layered motivations: community defense, treaty obligations, economic necessity, kinship traditions of soldiering, and the continuing vitality of Indigenous warrior ethics.
Long before the formation of modern nation-states, Indigenous societies across North America cultivated rich warrior traditions that linked martial skill to spiritual responsibility, kinship obligations, and the defense of land. Tom Holm’s work on Native Vietnam veterans describes a “warrior tradition” that persists as a moral framework: courage, sacrifice, and protection of relatives, broadly defined. These values often shape the decision to enlist more than abstract loyalty to the United States. Native veterans interviewed for Why We Serve emphasize responsibilities to ancestors, communities, and treaty-defined homelands alongside opportunities for education or employment.
Contemporary memorials and artworks materialize this continuity. Houser’s Comrade in Mourning and other sculptures made for Haskell and public sites refigure the warrior as a grieving guardian, bearing the weight of collective loss while refusing erasure of Native sacrifice. At the National Native American Veterans Memorial, Pratt’s elevated steel circle and stone drum invite visitors into motion around and through the work, echoing circular dances and reinforcing the idea that warriors remain embedded in community ceremonial life rather than set apart as purely national heroes.
Native people have served in every major U.S. conflict since the eighteenth century. Scholars estimate that more than ten thousand American Indians enlisted in World War I, despite many being legally denied U.S. citizenship at the time. Thomas Britten’s study of Native participation in the Great War shows that service both intensified assimilationist pressures and provided leverage for claims to citizenship and improved federal policy. Alison Bernstein documents similar dynamics in World War II, when some forty-four thousand Native people served out of a total Indigenous population of about 350,000, one of the highest per-capita rates of any group.
The NMAI exhibition Why We Serve extends this timeline forward, highlighting Native participation in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and peacekeeping missions, as well as the contributions of Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian service members. Institutional photographs, oral histories, and artworks in the exhibition emphasize that enlistment often clusters within families and communities; service becomes a lineage, much like traditional warrior societies, even as it responds to contemporary economic and political conditions.
Native service in U.S. wars has always been entangled with contested regimes of citizenship and sovereignty. Prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, many Native soldiers fought as non-citizens whose legal identities were defined by tribal membership and wardship under federal Indian law. Military service was sometimes explicitly weaponized as proof of “civilization,” used by policymakers to argue for allotment, termination, or other shifts in the federal–tribal relationship.
Yet Indigenous nations have never ceded their status as distinct political entities. Native leaders insist that citizenship in the United States does not erase tribal nationhood; rather, it produces a dual political identity. The NMAI’s curatorial framing of Why We Serve emphasizes treaty obligations and sovereignty: some nations understood alliance with the United States as a treaty-based commitment distinct from assimilationist narratives of melting-pot citizenship. Contemporary organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) foreground sovereignty in their policy work, reminding federal agencies that tribal nations are not simply ethnic minorities within a domestic body politic but governments whose citizens also happen to be veterans.
The pipeline from federal and mission boarding schools to military service is one of the most consequential yet understudied aspects of Native veterans’ history. David Wallace Adams and Brenda Child show how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boarding schools used military discipline (uniforms, drill, bugle calls, marching, and demerits) to enforce assimilation and suppress Indigenous languages. For many students, enlistment during World Wars I and II and later conflicts felt like an extension of a militarized upbringing that had already distanced them from home communities.
Artists have begun to narrate this trajectory visually. Maidu and Pit River painter Judith Lowry’s recent retrospective includes paintings inspired by her father’s and uncle’s experiences in Indian boarding schools, their escape, and their later military service as highly decorated soldiers. These works underline a circular path; children taken from their homelands, trained in military discipline, then sent overseas as representatives of a nation that had sought to eradicate their cultures. Lowry’s art, like family stories collected in Boarding School Seasons, insists that we read Native veteran histories through the lens of coerced schooling and cultural disruption as well as individual choice.
For many Native veterans, “patriotism” is a fraught term. Why We Serve explicitly asks why Native people would fight for a country that invaded their homelands and confined many to reservations. Curators and contributors suggest that the answer often lies less in abstract loyalty to the U.S. state than in attachment to specific lands, peoples, and treaties, along with a desire to defend Native homelands against foreign threats.
Recent political controversies highlight how unfinished histories of violence shape Indigenous readings of patriotic symbols. In 2025, U.S. defense officials announced that Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers involved in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre would be retained, despite calls from tribal leaders to rescind them as glorifications of a mass killing of Lakota civilians. For Native veterans whose ancestors survived such attacks, official narratives of honor and sacrifice sit uneasily alongside unresolved grief and ongoing land struggles. Patriotism, in this context, is not rejected outright but reframed. Loyalty to Native nations and responsibilities to land may coexist with, critique, or constrain loyalty to the U.S. state.
Navajo code talkers have become iconic in U.S. popular memory, but they were part of a broader Indigenous communications network in two world wars. The NMAI’s Native Words, Native Warriors online project documents code talkers from more than thirty nations, including Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Hopi, Assiniboine, and others. During World War I, Choctaw soldiers in the 36th Division pioneered the use of Native languages to secure communications; their success in the Meuse–Argonne campaign inspired further experimentation with Cherokee and other languages.
In World War II, Comanche code talkers in the 4th Infantry Division developed a 250-term vocabulary and transmitted vital messages during the Normandy landings and subsequent European campaigns, a history reconstructed in detail by William C. Meadows. Hopi, Assiniboine, and Cree speakers also served as code talkers, including for the Canadian forces. These stories illustrate both the strategic value of Indigenous languages and the long-term silencing of Indigenous contributions; only recently have federal governments begun to honor non-Navajo code talkers publicly, and even those recognitions have been subject to political erasure and restoration.
Native women have served in the U.S. armed forces since at least World War I, yet they remain less visible than their male counterparts. The NMAI’s coverage of Native women in Why We Serve highlights nurses, Women’s Army Corps members, WAVES, and later officers and enlisted women in all branches. Recent research shows that American Indian and Alaska Native women enlist and use VA care at high rates and are disproportionately likely to live in rural areas, magnifying access challenges.
Art and memorial culture increasingly foreground Native servicewomen. Jesse T. Hummingbird’s painting Veterans, reproduced in Why We Serve, includes women in uniform alongside men, visually correcting gendered omissions. The Heard Museum’s exhibition In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes features works made by and for Native women veterans, underscoring that warrior traditions have always been gender-diverse.
Two-Spirit is a contemporary pan-Indigenous term describing people whose roles, identities, or embodiments encompass more than one gender, grounded in specific tribal traditions rather than Western LGBT categories. Qwo-Li Driskill argues that Two-Spirit critiques are essential for understanding how colonialism targeted gender and sexuality as part of attacks on Native sovereignties and land bases.
Two-Spirit and LGBTQ+ Native veterans experience multiple, overlapping marginalizations. Many served under policies such as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which led to discharges and loss of benefits for queer and trans service members. A 2025 settlement between the Department of Defense and LGBTQ+ veterans has begun to streamline the process of upgrading such discharges and removing stigmatizing references, potentially restoring benefits to thousands. Yet recent changes in VA and Pentagon policies restricting gender-affirming care and rolling back explicit non-discrimination protections have raised alarms among advocates, who warn that trans and Two-Spirit veterans already face elevated mental health risks and barriers to treatment. Two-Spirit powwows and community gatherings, often explicitly welcoming veterans, function as crucial sites of healing and political organizing.
Twentieth-century relocation policies and contemporary economic migration have produced large urban Native populations. Many Native veterans now reside in cities far from their home reservations or villages. Studies of urban American Indian and Alaska Native health care access show complex patterns of insurance coverage, use of Indian Health Service (IHS), tribal clinics, urban Indian organizations, and mainstream hospitals. For veterans, this complexity is layered onto VA systems that were not originally designed with Indigenous urbanization in mind.
Policy initiatives have sought to address these gaps. The Health Care Access for Urban Native Veterans Act facilitates sharing agreements between VA, IHS, the Department of Defense, and urban Indian organizations, while congressional statements clarify that Native veterans may choose to receive care through either VA or IHS systems. IHS and VA have also developed an interactive map of urban Indian organizations and VA facilities to help American Indian and Alaska Native veterans navigate options. These efforts are promising but unevenly implemented, and many urban Native veterans still report confusion about eligibility, fragmented records, and limited culturally informed care.
Despite high rates of service, Native veterans often face disproportionate barriers to accessing benefits and health care. The VA Office of Health Equity’s American Indian/Alaska Native Veterans Fact Sheet notes disparities in insurance coverage, chronic disease burdens, and mental health outcomes, and it emphasizes the need for culturally competent services and robust intergovernmental partnerships. The 2022 National Veteran Health Equity Report – American Indian or Alaska Native Veteran Chartbook documents variations in patient experience and quality indicators across race, ethnicity, gender, and urban–rural residence, underscoring that AI/AN veterans face distinctive challenges.
Organizational research by T. David Noe and colleagues finds that VA facilities that perceive a strong need to serve American Indian and Alaska Native veterans and that have leaders who model culturally responsive practices are more likely to adopt Native-specific programming, though implementation remains inconsistent. The VA Office of Tribal Government Relations (OTGR) works with tribal leaders and tribal veterans service officers to increase awareness of benefits, but tribal testimony before Congress continues to highlight under-enrollment, transportation barriers, bureaucratic complexity, and distrust rooted in longer histories of federal neglect.
Conventional clinical frameworks often treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an individual pathology. Indigenous scholars such as Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Teresa Evans-Campbell instead propose historical trauma as a multilevel model that links contemporary distress to cumulative experiences of colonization, dispossession, boarding schools, and state violence. Within this framework, veterans’ combat trauma cannot be isolated from ancestral memories of massacre or from ongoing struggles over land and policing.
Recent VA and academic studies confirm that American Indian and Alaska Native veterans face elevated risks of suicide and suicide-related behaviors compared to other veteran groups. At the same time, Indigenous communities have developed robust healing practices that combine counseling, ceremony, and peer support. The Veterans Wellness Path app, created in collaboration with tribal partners, offers culturally grounded mental health resources for AI/AN veterans, illustrating how digital tools can be aligned with Indigenous paradigms rather than replacing them.
Homecoming for Native veterans is often marked not only by parades and flags but by ceremonies in tribal languages, offerings at sacred sites, and specific rituals of purification and rebalancing. Powwows across Indian Country include veteran honor songs, grand-entry roles for color guards, and giveaways acknowledging those who served. Two-Spirit powwows explicitly honor queer and gender-diverse veterans while reclaiming pre-colonial understandings of gender and spirituality.
The National Native American Veterans Memorial was designed precisely as a site where such ceremonies can unfold in a federal space. Pratt’s design incorporates water for cleansing, lances where visitors tie prayer cloths, and a circular pathway inviting movement, song, and offerings. VA facilities and tribal clinics have also experimented with integrating sweat lodges, talking circles, and traditional healers into care plans for Native veterans, though access to such programs remains uneven across regions.
Native memorial practices for fallen warriors range from local grave markers to national and international monuments. Allan Houser’s Comrade in Mourning at Haskell Indian Nations University remains a foundational work in Native memorial art, blending stylized modernist form with a deeply Indigenous representation of mourning and guardianship. Pratt’s Warriors’ Circle of Honor extends this memorial tradition into the heart of Washington, DC, creating what NMAI describes as an “interactive yet intimate space for gathering, remembrance, reflection, and healing.”
Beyond the United States, the National Aboriginal Veterans Monument in Ottawa honors First Nations, Inuit, and Métis veterans and reminds viewers that Indigenous service is a transnational phenomenon intertwined with colonial histories across the Americas. These monuments both acknowledge sacrifice and call attention to the unfinished work of justice, from recognition of historical massacres to the return of lands.
Native veteran artists have profoundly reshaped modern and contemporary art. T. C. Cannon (Kiowa and Caddo), a paratrooper in Vietnam, developed a vivid painting style that layered bright color, Indigenous figures in military and contemporary dress, and biting commentary on U.S. imperialism and Native survivance. Exhibitions such as T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America emphasize how his experience as a Vietnam veteran informed his political and aesthetic sensibilities.
Rick Bartow (Mad River Band Wiyot), who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and received a Bronze Star for playing music for wounded soldiers, later produced a prolific body of drawings, paintings, and sculptures exploring trauma, transformation, animals, and hybrid human figures. Museums describe his work as a decades-long meditation on recuperation and survival. Michael Naranjo’s tactile bronzes and public statements, inscribed at the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial and displayed in museums worldwide, offer a philosophy of focusing on what remains rather than what has been lost.
Institutional exhibitions have begun to bring these and other artists into dialogue. The Heard Museum’s In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes showcases artworks and tribute pieces created by and for American Indian veterans, explicitly linking artmaking to healing and intergenerational responsibility.
While official military histories often marginalize Indigenous voices, Native veterans and their families have long circulated stories through oral tradition, community gatherings, and, increasingly, recorded interviews and digital media. The NMAI’s Why We Serve video series presents first-person accounts from Indigenous veterans who discuss their reasons for enlisting, experiences of racism and camaraderie, and the meanings of returning home. These narratives complicate monolithic tales of heroism by foregrounding ambivalence, humor, trauma, and resilience.
Literature and children’s books further transmit intergenerational memory. Judith Lowry’s illustrations for a children’s book about her father’s and uncle’s boarding school escape and subsequent service invite young readers into complex histories of coercion and agency. Storytelling in this sense is not mere reminiscence; it is a political act that asserts Indigenous presence, critiques colonial militarism, and offers models of survivance for future generations.
Veterans occupy prominent positions in many tribal governments and community organizations. Leadership studies have noted that military experience, particularly in logistics, administration, and intergovernmental negotiation, has equipped some veterans to navigate complex jurisdictional landscapes. The VA’s Office of Tribal Government Relations explicitly courts tribal leaders, emphasizing that cooperation with tribal governments is essential for reaching Indigenous veterans and tailoring services to local needs.
Tribal veterans service officers (TVSOs) often function as crucial intermediaries, translating VA procedures into culturally resonant terms and advocating for veterans who might otherwise be deterred by bureaucratic hurdles. Congressional proposals such as the National American Indian Veterans Charter Bill recognize Native veterans organizations as key partners in ensuring that benefits are fully realized. Veterans’ authority, however, is not uncontested; some community members question militarism or worry about the influence of U.S. nationalist narratives within tribal politics. These internal debates are part of an ongoing negotiation over how to honor service while sustaining decolonial futures.
For many Indigenous veterans, service is inseparable from land. Some describe enlistment as a way to protect ancestral territories from foreign threats; others return to become environmental advocates, land protectors, or cultural resource managers. Yet histories of military policy also reveal how veterans were implicated in further dispossession. In Canada, the Soldier Settlement Act of 1919 allowed the government to expropriate reserve lands to provide farms for returning non-Indigenous veterans, while First Nations veterans who applied for the same grants often received only certificates to use reserve land rather than title, deepening inequalities.
Contemporary land-back struggles intersect with veteran experiences. The recent legal victory returning a long-contested beach to the Saugeen First Nation in Ontario underscores how courts are finally recognizing historic treaty boundaries after decades of activism. In the United States, memorials like Houser’s Comrade in Mourning and Pratt’s Warriors’ Circle of Honor are sited on lands layered with histories of Indigenous presence and removal, turning federal and institutional spaces into contested terrains of memory and sovereign presence.
Comparing Indigenous service in the United States, Canada, and Mexico reveals both shared patterns and significant differences. In Canada, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people have served in large numbers in both world wars and later conflicts, often returning to discrimination and inadequate benefits. Veterans Affairs Canada now formally honors Indigenous veterans and acknowledges injustices such as postwar land programs that favored non-Indigenous veterans with grants of expropriated reserve land. Cree code talkers and other Indigenous specialists supported Allied efforts, but their contributions remained classified and unrecognized for decades.
In Mexico, Indigenous peoples have long served in the armed forces, including the famed 201st Fighter Squadron, the “Aztec Eagles,” which flew combat missions in the Pacific during World War II. At the same time, Indigenous communities in Mexico, such as the Yaqui, have also been targets of military campaigns, echoing the ambivalent position of Native peoples in the United States. Contemporary Indigenous movements across the continent increasingly frame veterans’ experiences within broader decolonial struggles over land, language, and governance, opening possibilities for cross-border solidarities among Native veterans who served under different flags but share histories of colonialism.
Native military service is not a simple story of patriotic assimilation into settler states, nor is it merely a tragic tale of Indigenous people fighting for their oppressors. It is a dense, often contradictory history in which warrior traditions, treaty obligations, economic realities, and individual aspirations intersect. Native veterans have fought in every major U.S. conflict, navigated transformations in citizenship and sovereignty, and confronted the legacies of boarding schools and land dispossession. Their experiences foreground forms of patriotism rooted less in devotion to an abstract nation-state than in enduring commitments to land, kin, and community.
At the same time, Native veterans face disproportionate burdens; elevated risks of PTSD and suicide, barriers to benefits, racial and gender discrimination, and policy shifts that threaten access to lifesaving care, especially for Two-Spirit and LGBTQ+ veterans. Indigenous scholars and communities respond with frameworks of historical trauma, ceremonies of healing and homecoming, and powerful art that insists on survivance rather than victimhood. Memorials and exhibitions, Houser’s Comrade in Mourning, Pratt’s Warriors’ Circle of Honor, Cannon’s and Bartow’s paintings, Naranjo’s touchable bronzes, and the Heard Museum’s In the Service Of, create spaces where Native veterans and their families can grieve, remember, and imagine decolonial futures.
Comparative perspectives from Canada and Mexico remind us that these dynamics are hemispheric. As Indigenous nations continue to assert sovereignty, pursue land rematriation, and build transnational alliances, Native veterans remain central figures; bridging worlds, telling stories, and embodying both the scars of war and the possibilities of healing. To honor them adequately requires not only ceremonies and monuments but structural commitments to health equity, land justice, and the flourishing of Indigenous nations whose warriors have long defended more than any single flag.
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