Sometimes you just get lucky.

Washington State University graduate students Laura Briere and Jared Chastain, along with their faculty adviser, historian Orlan Svingen, were in College Park, Maryland last spring looking for information about the storied 161st Infantry Regiment when they stepped off the elevator on the wrong floor.

It turned out to be a fortunate mistake.

They’d hoped to find old photographs and other paper documents from the Washington National Guard regiment’s World War II deployment but stumbled onto something even more dramatic. Specifically, an old film reel containing never-before-publicly viewed footage of the unit’s fierce, island-by-island march across the Pacific.

“I wasn’t expecting any video clips,” says Briere, a school teacher from Richmond, Virginia working on a history master’s at WSU in Pullman. “We had gone there hoping to find documents, paperwork and maybe some pictures.”

They came away with so much more.

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WSU Insider

Ryan W. Booth, a Ph.D. student in history at Washington State University and member of the Upper Skagit tribe, gave his talk “They Are Always at the Front” Tuesday night at Wolff Auditorium, discussing the contributions of Native American soldiers during World War I.

Despite assimilation being well-studied, he explained that martial race theory, which says that certain races of men are more war-like than others, has only been recently discussed. He added that both of these concepts help explain some of the motivations behind Native men volunteering for service during the war.

Using anecdotes, Booth explained how the spirit of most Native soldiers was of valiance and bravery, and that the front represented the greatest chance of death, but also the greatest freedom away from the strictures of Army life.

Through the martial race theory, World War I military sought to “identify and exploit” these groups to fight for their side, but the same armies supported efforts to assimilate these indigenous soldiers into Euro-American culture.

“The odd nature of attitudes towards Native Americans in the World War I period is the two-faced aspect of it,” Booth said. “On the one hand, Natives represented a fierce fighting force backed up by millennia of ancient warrior culture. On the other hand, that same culture was under assault at home as the assimilation projects, such as boarding schools, attempted to eradicate all remnants of that indigenous culture.”

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Gonzaga Bulletin