Budd Parker & Tim “Pete” Fairbanks: Restoring the Legacy of White Earth’s Forgotten Veterans

Transcript

[Music: Native Lights Theme]

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: It takes some work. Shovel around the marker and pry it up so it's straight.

BUDD PARKER: And then you find out it's got like a two foot by two foot by two foot tall giant piece of granite that has sunk two feet underground. And at one time it was above ground.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Oh, my wife called us the Grim Reapers. We did so much work in the cemeteries. I thought that was pretty funny.

LEAH LEMM: Boozhoo, hello, welcome to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. I'm your host Leah Lemm.

COLE PREMO: And I'm your other host Cole Premo. Miigwech for joining us today. Native Lights is more than a podcast and radio show. At its core, it's a place for Native folks to tell their stories. Each and every week, we have captivating conversations with great guests from a whole lot of different backgrounds. You know, we're talking musicians, community leaders, healthcare advocates, language warriors-you name it. They have a wonderful mixture of passions. We talk to them about their gifts and how they share the gifts with their community. It all centers around the big point of purpose in our lives and can't wait to continue amplifying Native voices today. Leah, how you doing?

LEAH LEMM: I'm doing great, Cole. How about you?

COLE PREMO: Doing amazing, doing amazing. You know?

LEAH LEMM: Yeah. How's that family of yours?

COLE PREMO: It's great. Artem's walking around all over the place. It's crazy. We were just on a little walk right before this. He was yelling at all the cars that were passing by, so just yelling, but good stuff.

LEAH LEMM: That sounds cute.

COLE PREMO: His voice really carries far throughout the neighborhood, I've found, so I'm sure our neighbors appreciate that.

LEAH LEMM: Yeah, well, I understand a bit with Marvin and video games, but we won't get into that too much.

COLE PREMO: Oh, I bet.

LEAH LEMM: Well, if it's okay with you, Cole, we have a special program today because we have two guests.

COLE PREMO: Whoa!

LEAH LEMM: So I think we'll just get right to it.

COLE PREMO: Let's do it. Yeah.

LEAH LEMM: All right. So today we're joined by Budd Parker. Budd is a Navy veteran and descendant of the White Earth Nation, he lives in Osage, and he was raised by grandparents who knew Civil War soldiers. And he and his crew dig through records. They clear forgotten cemeteries and set corrected headstones so families can hear their ancestors' names again. And today he's joined by his cousin Tim "Pete" Fairbanks, who's also from the White Earth Nation, and he works with Budd to restore headstones and graveyards as well. Really looking forward to this conversation with two folks today. So let's say hello, boozhoo, Bud, and Tim.

BUDD PARKER: Boozhoo.

COLE PREMO: All right, hello guys.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Okay.

COLE PREMO: And Tim, do you prefer to go by Pete or what?

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: It really doesn't make any difference. Pete is fine.

COLE PREMO: Okay, could you start out by introducing yourself? Maybe we start with Budd first.

BUDD PARKER: Yeah, my name's Budd Parker. Used to live right in the village of White Earth for many years. My mother's family are all from, enrolled from White Earth. My father was non-Native. They met in the army, so do a lot of historical stuff. I've always been interested in history. My grandparents were tremendous influence on me growing up, helped raise me quite a bit, and always telling stories about White Earth and their growing up years, my grandpa was born 1885 at White Earth. My grandma in 1901. As a little child, I was pretty just interested in their stories. They tell stories about these people that Civil War soldiers and stuff, and but it was like real stories. It was like they would tell you conversations they had with them. So it was like not reading something from a book. It was like these people became real to me, and going through old photographs and all of the relatives around that I grew up with. They were all born 1890s in that time period, 1900, and so yeah, that's what got me interested in a lot of this stuff.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Okay, I was born in White Earth in in 1955, but I was I was raised in Pine Point and Ponsford area. I became interested in all the history stuff about 1987 when my dad and my cousin [Dwight] Him-Him Richardson got reacquainted after about 60 years visiting with them, and they start talking about all the old times and all of our old people that sparked an interest in me. Our cousin Him-Him he was always up to the cemeteries, tending to all our old people's graves, so that nudged me in that direction. Also, there was a lot of history being talked amongst those two fellows, and it was really interesting. Yeah, that that that did push me to helping Bud in the cemeteries. So, and working in the cemeteries is pretty much like a history lesson. Also, all the names that you've heard, you can you can see their markers. Resting places, but my my grandparents they were born in 1886. My grandfather and my grandmother was born in 1890, and they both spoke fluent Ojibwe and very good role models.

COLE PREMO: We'd like to ask before we dive into it, just how you guys are doing. How's the family doing?

BUDD PARKER: My family doing pretty good. It's just me and my husband Bruce. Oh, we're getting older, but health-wise, we're all right. We're all right.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: My family we're doing pretty good. Yeah, we don't have any room to complain at all. We're doing pretty good.

LEAH LEMM: Good. Well, I would love to just jump right into our conversation. You gave us a pretty good kind of intro into how you got started. Budd, can you describe the work that you do with gravestones and cemeteries?

BUDD PARKER: I started out whenever I'd come home from the Navy. Well, even before I went in the Navy, we'd come up to White Earth, and I think the first gravestone I bought was for my grandma's mumma, my great grandma, and then her sister, my aunt Blanche, that my mumma was named for. She died very young; she was only 15, and my grandma's mother died in childbirth when she was 33 in 1906. So they didn't have anything on their graves, just some wooden crosses that had disintegrated. We came back to the reservation. They had been gone for many years. A lot of the folks went out to the, got in the government Indian service. So that kind of started me with the trying to fix up the ones that were broken up there and falling over different these people that you'd heard stories about, and then you'd go up there and you'd see their gravestones. It was like, oh my God, I remember hearing about this one or that one, and so many of the stones were falling over, had already fallen over. It really bothered me as young, you know, in my 20s. So every time I'd come back, I'd give up my, we always called Him-Him, my uncle, but he was really a distant cousin. But he was uncle to all of us, and he was a guiding light in that, and always go up and help us until he couldn't walk anymore. So then he came up and directed me. We have a lot of Civil War soldiers on our reservation that a lot of people don't realize how many Shinobs [Anishinaabe] fought in the Civil War and also chimookomaan that came out and married into the tribe. The people were always real proud of them. I remember growing up hearing all these names, you know, Albert Fairbanks, Frank Roy, James VanWert, different ones, and it surprised me as time got. By the time I was even in my 20s, early 30s, that you mentioned that, and these people were forgetting them, and it's like, oh my gosh, you know, how could you be forgetting these? Because I mean, growing up, I heard about them all the time, but their stones were getting so dilapidated and more. So we started ordering. I went to Washington, went through, copied all their records, and we got new gravestones for, I don't know, more than 50 of them, upright granite headstones for them. So it just kind of, I don't know, maybe an obsession. It just keeps going.

COLE PREMO: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking to Budd Parker, a Navy veteran and descendant of White Earth, who lives in Osage. He and his crew, including his cousin Tim Fairbanks, clear forgotten cemeteries, set corrected headstones, so their families can hear their ancestors' names again.

LEAH LEMM: Pete, do you have anything to add in regards to the nature of your work and how you would describe it?

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Budd and I pretty much had the same relationship with our cousin Him-Him, probably had the same conversations. We talked about the same people. It gave us both a good feeling to help, you know preserve these people's memory during some good, so that's what I enjoyed about working in the cemeteries. You go home feeling good, you know that you've remembered these people after them being gone for so long.

LEAH LEMM: What do you find to be kind of the common issues with the cemeteries or the gravestones that you find

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: A lot of these cemeteries are old, so these markers are old, and with all of the frost upheaval and stuff, a lot of the markers needed to be straightened at one time or another, and I, I'd like to know how many stones we've straightened over the years. I wouldn't even have a guess for you, but it's a lot. Sometimes we would put in one Civil War marker and end up straightening maybe three or four just regular markers from people we didn't even know, but if they're if they're in in need of straightening, well, while we were there. Budd thought it would be a good idea to just go ahead and straighten them while we were there. So that's what we did.

LEAH LEMM: How do you do that? Do you just is it just you know muscles and brute force, or is there a method to straightening these?

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: It takes some work. Shovel around the marker, and maybe get underneath one side of it, the low side of it, and stick a bar underneath there, and pry it up so it's straight, and shove gravel or some kind of fill underneath the marker to hold it straight again. Once you get the bar out of there and then fill in around the edge and make it look presentable again.

BUDD PARKER: When you're digging those, oftentimes you look at a stone and you don't think it's oh this will be easy, and then you find out it's got like a two foot by two foot by two foot tall giant piece of granite that has sunk two feet underground, and at one time it was above ground. And then on top of that, there'll be people have poured concrete. So sometimes, like we just did one stone, we thought it would take half hour. It took two hours digging one. So it can be a lot of work. It's not easy. It's hard to get volunteers. We're always scrounging for money, but you can hardly get anybody to pay anybody to do that kind of work anymore.

LEAH LEMM: Is there any concern about oh, we need to ask for permission, or do people around there just like know who you are, and they're like oh, they're just taking care of things?

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: I think people around here know us by now.

LEAH LEMM: Well, you bring up money. Do you do it volunteer?

BUDD PARKER: Oh yeah, we dig into our own pockets every now and then. We get a donation, but it's a rare it's a rare thing. Yeah, neither one of us are in divorce court yet.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Oh, my wife called us the Grim Reapers. We did so much work in the cemeteries. I thought that was pretty funny.

COLE PREMO: Do you remember when you first worked together?

BUDD PARKER: Ooh, well, Pete and I working together probably what 26 years ago or something like that. Twenty-seven years.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Yeah, it was right around that.

BUDD PARKER: We were in that way. Yeah.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: It's always gone real well.

BUDD PARKER: At one time, we lifted at the Catholic cemetery in White Earth, we had I don't know, I'd guess at least 30 volunteers that came out. A lot of them non-Native. A lot of the white farmers' families came in there. Gary Hoban, Ronnie Lanoue, Bill Brakefield. Three different years, we lifted up these stones. A couple of them were so heavy it required a backhoe, put new cement just with wheelbarrows going around, replaced the foundations on them. We tried to keep them as historically. We didn't want to alter them in any way. We wanted to preserve them as historically accurate as possible. I think we started that in the Civil War about the same time, and then Pete started working on the Veterans Memorial over at the clinic, and that that was another big project, kind of at the same time.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Yeah, I started that right around 2007, I think. I wanted to put up a memorial to honor our people that we lost in war, and what got me started on this. There was a World War II combat veteran that was real good friends with my mom, and he came over to visit her one day. He knew I was interested in military, and he asked me if I knew about the prisoner of war guy that was buried in a little village that I was raised in, and I said no. I said I had no idea, and sure enough, I checked with the veteran service officer, and sure enough, he was a prisoner of war. He was in Stalag 9b. He got captured at the Battle of the Bulge. The following Memorial Day, I went up to visit his grave to find his grave. I did find his grave, but he didn't have a flag on it. So I said, oh my gosh! I said we've got to do something to remember these folks. So when this this new clinic opened, they had some kind of budget for some art artwork in there, and I proposed doing this wall of honor in the clinic, and they approved it. So that's how that got started. And the tribe they paid for it upwards of $7,000 at that time. We honored, I think it was 33 soldiers.

COLE PREMO: From what I've seen, you've been searching for original photos of these soldiers.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Buds is the one that's the researcher on the photos.

COLE PREMO: Gotcha.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: If there's one existing, he'll find it.

BUDD PARKER: When we started, they renovated the clinic. They damaged a lot of the ones they put them in storage, so you know that was really unfortunate, but it was actually beneficial because it gave us a chance to—I wasn't able to help Pete the first go around. But this time we were able to research more since they were damaged. We found more information on them, started trying to look for pictures, and basically had to do genealogy on every one of them trying to track down living relatives, and it really has paid off. I can't remember how many we found, but five World War II veterans that were killed that we can't find pictures of, and one Spanish American war, and five-I think five or six World War One-you know, tracking down relatives here. Lo and behold, just what a few weeks ago, a woman came out here from Michigan. I asked her about this relative of hers from World War One, and she contacted an aunt or a cousin down in Florida. Here, she had a framed picture of this young man that was killed or died in World War One of the Spanish flu. She emailed it to us, so I tell Pete never lose hope. Just always keep on plugging away. And we also started to honor the female veterans who generally get overlooked, and that's something that Pete had been trying to get interest in for many years. And we finally made it happen. I can't remember how many women, but we found pictures of all of the women, the female veterans. I haven't told Pete that, but unfortunately, I found two more yesterday--a Korean War and a World War II veteran. So now I'm trying to track down relatives on that to see if we can get those. But I can't remember how many there were of the females.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: I think there was 32.

BUDD PARKER: Thirty-two. Yeah.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: I think so.

BUDD PARKER: Just found out there's one from the Mahnomen area that was in World War II, and then another one from Naytahwaush is in Korea era. So we're trying to find pictures of them now. So those are the last two.

COLE PREMO: I guess that brings up a question: If a listener who hears this episode has an old photo soldier killed in action. You know what would you suggest they do to pass that along?

BUDD PARKER: Usually, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. I try. I've been. I'm not a good writer, but I've been trying to write stories in the tribal paper. We put that in there, and we always put an email address and physical address if they can mail something to or stuff like that. One of the emails is just whiteearthhistory@gmail.com, and then Pete's is what Faircox?

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Faircox@arvig.net.

BUDD PARKER: Yeah. Any of these the females and these veterans that have that were died in the wars several of these ones that we're missing Emery St John, [Charles V.] "Buster" Smith. I knew their sisters, but I wasn't doing this at the time, and I knew them for years, and then they've passed away. Most of them were Ojibwe hymn singers. I sing with my husband, and I sing with the Ojibwe hymn singers, and I traveled all over Minnesota with some of them, and now I just kick myself. I never, I just wasn't involved in this, but they would have had pictures of them.

LEAH LEMM: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Today, we're speaking with Budd Parker and Pete Fairbanks, both from the White Earth Nation, and they work to restore headstones and cemeteries.

COLE PREMO: Is there one soldier whose story has stayed with you?

BUDD PARKER: Some of those really get emotional when you find out getting records and stuff, because most of their personnel records were destroyed in a 1973 fire. About 98% of Army and Air Force records from World War One through Vietnam, if they were in the archives, were destroyed in a fire. So the only thing that does exist for a lot of them is what they call IDPF, and it's basically a file dealing with their remains that they kept, and those can get very graphic. There's a couple of them that are in unmarked graves from World War One, and you read about how they left this area. They'd never left the reservation. Maybe all of a sudden they're killed in France. One of them was on the on the field for a couple weeks before they found him, and now they brought him back. But he's in an unmarked grave. They do get emotional, and we become kind of personal with each one of them. They all have their own different story, and these memorials we've created, it's awful to try to put their experience into a tiny little paragraph. But between the photographs, and then we put the as many as we could find out, what medals they may have gotten, patches for their unit, different things like that. But we've tried to put as much in there, and then I've written articles for the paper. Tried to cover so many of them as I can, just to just that they're remembered, because so many of them, their stories, all that they went through, are gone. Two first cousins, Charbonneaus, they were both in the Navy. Both of them were torpedoed, and their bodies were never found. The one of them, his parents had to wait four years before the Navy declared him dead. And so you think about not just what the service men and women went through, but you think about their entire family, the anguish of waiting four years and every day, hoping you're going to hear that they're even if they're a prisoner of war, they're alive. So yeah, it can get emotional.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Sometimes you research these guys for so long, you feel like you know them. I researched this guy that the prisoner of war from Pine Point for over three years before I finally figured out which prisoner of war camp he was in. So when I finally found out, I was just overjoyed, but I I just felt like I knew the man. It had been so long. I had been searching everywhere I knew possible. I finally did find out in the end where he was.

BUDD PARKER: And lately, I talked to one woman, Pauline Vizenor. She's-I'm not sure how old she is, 90. There's still a few people that can tell you stories about that. And she remembered when Robert TeJohn's wife got the message that he was killed, and she was just walking towards their house and just holding a piece of paper but just wailing. She didn't know how to read, but she knew that she knew it was when she got that telegram how bad it was. You feel like you know these people and you sympathize with their whole family. It's just like my God. And then when you hear people now that make like war is like a walk, in World War Two is a walk in the park, and it's like, oh no, you know, no.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Kids went through it. Horrible wars, horrible.

BUDD PARKER: And one good thing that's interesting about this is Pete has done that, and I've found that is we have Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and it's a day that we remember these, but over in France and the Netherlands and places like that that have these national cemeteries, my God, some of those people they celebrate, they honor these American and British soldiers that were killed. They honor them for like week-long celebrations. They adopt their graves. They go out and take care of them. They've researched them. They've had museums. I don't think a lot of Americans realize that how much the people in Europe to this day appreciate the sacrifices of all these soldiers from World War One and World War Two.

TIM "PETE" FAIRBANKS: Yeah, yeah. The one guy I know in France. Yeah, they hold a week-long celebration, you know, honoring the 517th Airborne. They're the ones that liberated this fellow that runs this organization's grandmother in World War II. They do a great job honoring these folks.

LEAH LEMM: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. What comes next with this work?

BUDD PARKER: I don't know. I think it's gonna, it'll continue as long as it's pretty much Pete and my husband Bruce and myself. But we're getting we've got all well. Bruce doesn't, but we Pete and I both have bad backs, and we're paying the price for a lot of this stuff now. And it's getting harder. We have two young guys that have been helping us a lot. We have to pay them because you know that's they need an income, but so we dig in our own pockets and pay for them. Creators Place has helped out with these two, but it's hard to get community volunteers anymore. I don't want to say anything negative, but it's very different than years ago. Whole communities came out. I know one woman, Sarah Potter, growing up, and Sarah would have been born probably 1890s. But her whole family she took up there, and they'd put them all to work growing up. And so later in life, all of those went up there and did that. But that's kind of a thing of the past. It's very hard to. We have several abandoned cemeteries. We've been struggling to. They're completely grown up. One of them is near Pine Point. It's the original Catholic cemeteries right on the graves. Come right up to the road. They started clearing this out with hand just hand clippers. All of a sudden, people could see these gravestones, and they were just like come to a halt driving by. They'd driven by there. They lived down the road, and they never knew there was a cemetery there. I don't know where it's going to go, but you do what you can while you're here and then hope for the best. And there's a few young people that we've tried to introduce. And when a community is involved, you have ownership, and that's the one thing is like try to get as many people involved as we can.

LEAH LEMM: Thank you. I'd like to go back and talk about the headstones from the Civil War that were updated with names, but if you could say a little bit about that project, you know, having headstones that reflect real names.

BUDD PARKER: A lot of people were illiterate; they didn't know how to read or write, so. And some of these Shinobs [Anishinaabe], they didn't even have a European name, so when they went to enlist, they had to pick a name. And you know, with the accent, trying to speak this to English-speaking people, they misunderstood. Like one of them, he was trying to take a name of his neighbors and friends, the Tudocharts, and they couldn't figure that out, so they wrote his name down as Tudo Chart, but his name was actually Peter Bear. Another one was a guy who's full blood. His name was Ah-be-daush, and his parents were killed by the by the Lakota people in in in a fight. You know, way back when he was a child, William and Ellen Morrison took him in and raised him. So when he tried to enlist, he thought he would take William Morrison's name. So he was trying to say Morrison, but they misunderstood him and they couldn't. And so they wrote Moors instead. And then another one was two brothers who enlist at the same time. They were French mixed bloods. They were Pembina. The real name of them was his name was Etienne Rossignol de Bleau, and then his brother was Felix Rossignol de Bleau. They were both trying to say their name at the same time, and they listed. Well, one of them, his name, the guy wrote it down as Ecan—E C A N--Rescenlidue. But the brother Felix, the guy gave up on that, I guess, and he just wrote his name down as Felix Blow. But when we did that at the time, they let me put on there their real name, but then we were also able to put also known as, and I'd put their name that they enlisted under because they would anybody would never find their record if using the real name, and then also we were able to put their Indian name on the a lot of them. So Ah-be-daush was the last one I found his grave, and he was my grandpa's relative. They changed the rules with the administration. Now you can't put also known as and anything on there. I wound up contacting a place that contracts with the VA and does the grave headstones as veteran's marker? I just paid for it myself, so it's got his William Morrison, but then it's got also known as William Morrison Ah-be-daush. There's something there with their name. It's like, hey, this person was here. This person, we're receiving the benefits that they sacrifice for, and neither one of us are like you know glorifying military or war. It's like kind of the opposite of showing the the price of it, the horror of it, and the senselessness of it.

[Music: Native Lights Theme]

LEAH LEMM: Budd Parker and Pete Fairbanks doing the good work, making sure our relatives who have journeyed on have nice, clean cemeteries and upright headstones.

COLE PREMO: Yeah, such selfless work from them, and appreciate their work. You know, restoring, preserving those headstones and cemeteries, and some good, good work.

LEAH LEMM: Yeah, volunteer work. So we'll just note that there.

COLE PREMO: Volunteer work, yeah. All right. So miigwech to our guests, Budd Parker and Pete Fairbanks. I'm Cole Premo.

LEAH LEMM: And I'm Leah Lemm. Miigwech for listening. Giga-waabamin.

COLE PREMO: Giga-waabamin.

LEAH LEMM: You're listening to Native Lights, where Indigenous voices shine. Native Lights is produced by Minnesota Native News and AMPERS with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.