Hayes was going to go home to a reservation where the water rights of his people had still not been restored, where economic opportunity was still severely limited, where the legal status of Native Americans remained in important ways unequal to that of white citizens.

He performed the symbol because he had been ordered to and because it would have taken a kind of political analysis that the nineteen-forties did not offer him to have articulated what he seems to have understood intuitively: that the country was using him in ways that did not fully reckon with who he actually was.

He was not the only one.

The bond tour used all three survivors instrumentally.