A third-generation Navy veteran, Spot-


tedwolf served from 2010 to 2017 during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom as a Gunner’s Mate Petty Officer Second Class. She helped maintain weapons ranging from 9 mm handguns up to entire weapons systems. She also trained crew mem- bers how to use them and made sure that they had enough ammunition. “My job was to help keep everybody alive in a firefight,” she says. As she was often the only Indigenous per-


son on board, she felt at times like “the weird exotic in a lot of my commands. I am not just a Native, but a Plains Native, from a land- locked part of the country. Kind of ironic.” She was also frequently one of only a handful of women. “You face all the adversity being a Native American female in a male-dominated MOS [military occupational specialty],” she says. But that helped drive her. “It pushed me to the kind of level that I became an asset.” Mitchelene BigMan (Apsáalooke [Crow]/


WRITING THEIR OWN HISTORIES


On and off the battlefield, Indigenous women have served in every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Just as other women veterans, they joined for a variety of reasons and they shared some of their struggles. However, as Native women, some have experienced additional challenges. Some turned to military service because


Top, left to right: Marine Corps Women Reservists Minnie Spotted Wolf (Blackfoot), Celia Mix (Potawatomi) and Viola Eastman (Chippewa) at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in 1943. Above: Laura Wright served in the Alaska Territo- rial Guard before becoming a world-renowned parka maker.


20 AMERICAN INDIAN FALL 2020


they were following in the footsteps of their family members and had a desire to defend their people. Marilee Spottedwolf is a direct descendant of Northern Cheyenne War Chief Spotted Wolf, who led the Battle of Rosebud Creek in Montana on June 17, 1876, a week before Little Bighorn. “In Cheyenne culture, the Rosebud Battle is referred to as the Battle Where the Girl Saves Her Brother. Chief Comes In Sight was surrounded, about to be shot, when his sister, Buffalo Calf Road Woman, rode in on her horse and saved him. In that height of the genocide, a lot of women actively participated in war,” Spottedwolf says. “Having that kind of legacy plays into what we do today. ... The woman veteran is not un- common in our tribe.”


Hidatsa) knows from experience that In- digenous servicewomen often don’t get credit for their work and feel they have to try harder to prove themselves. BigMan enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1986. After U.S. service- women were finally allowed into combat in the 1990s, she served as a Sergeant First Class, working as a mechanic in Operation Iraqi Freedom with two deployments in Balad. “We were the first to volunteer for the craziest missions knowing we may not make it home,” she says. In Iraq, “when we had to go to a village, I’d be the first one to go in,” she says. “I’d have to pretend that I was not scared, even though I was.” When 23-year-old Private Lori Piestewa


(Hopi) became the first Native woman to die in combat in 2003, BigMan says she thought, “She made the ultimate sacrifice. She kissed her kids goodbye and didn’t come home. I listened to flute music and burned sage. I just cried. It hit home. It could have been me.” “As a soldier, we are trained not to think we


are women,” says BigMan. She was often told, “You wear your heart on your stripes” because she cared about those under her command. “Those soldiers relied on me, expected that I would bring them home safe.” But then, “If I am a soldier, well, then treat me like one,” she says. “Treat me as a comrade.” While many tribes acknowledge and


respect their women veterans, BigMan says that initially after she retired in 2009, “My own people didn’t recognize what I had done.” She founded Native American Wom- en Warriors to raise awareness of women veterans’ contributions. The organization


PHOTO COURTESY OF SHEILA EZELLE


PHOTO: NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO NO. 535876


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