Employment options were constrained by geography, by education, by the absence of the kind of industrial infrastructure that was generating the post-war economic expansion in American cities and suburbs.

Native Americans, including Hayes and his family, also faced continuing legal inequalities.

The right of Native people to vote was complicated in some states by state-level restrictions that federal law had not yet cleared away.

Some Arizona statutes continued to deny or restrict Native American voting rights for years after World War II ended.

The men who fought and died at Iwo Jima came home to a country that was, in certain formal legal senses, not yet prepared to treat them as full citizens.

This is not a minor footnote to Hayes’s story.