It loses the specificity of who Hayes was — Akimel O’odham, from the Gila River, from a community whose history of dispossession was both the context and the background for his life.

It loses the water, which is the key to the whole story of his community.

It loses the particular quality of what it meant to be a Native man being asked to represent national unity in 1945, when the country’s relationship with its Native peoples was still structured by policies of dispossession and assimilation.

It loses the specific men he raised the flag with and the specific deaths he carried afterward.

The simplified version turns Hayes into a symbol of something — of American ambivalence about heroism, or of the costs of fame, or of the tragedy of Native American life in the twentieth century — and in doing so, it repeats the same move that damaged him in the first place: it reduces him to what he represents rather than attending to who he was.