Free Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman Page B

the flu epidemic. It was a devastating blow for the Indigenous population on the heels of near-annihilation from genocide, abject poverty, disenfranchisement, disease, and brutal forced relocation.
    The head nurse Daisy Codding recorded a staggering 150 flu cases and thirteen deaths at the school. As the superintendent writes: “I was so extremely busy that it was impossible for me to tell you the particulars in connection with the death of Cecilia.” Cecilia died more than two hundred miles from her family, which was no rarity among Indigenous children. Under the creed “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” the US government removed tens of thousands of Native American children from their families and forced them into federally run boarding schools for assimilation. As Cecilia’s death shows, genocidal education could indeed “kill the Indian.” The superintendent’s letter ends: “Trusting that Cecilia’s body reached you in good shape and sympathizing with you, I am.” The Chemawa Indian School remains the oldest boarding school for Native American students still operating in the country.
    Dana Hedgpeth, “Native American Tribes Were Already Being Wiped Out—Then the 1918 Flu Hit,” Washington Post , September 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/28/1918-flu-native-americans-coronavirus .
    “Members of Oregon’s Congressional Delegation Continue to Demand Answers Surrounding Chemawa Indian School,” Congressional Documents and Publications, Federal Information & News Dispatch, LLC, 2018.
SELMA EPP
    Catherine Arnold, Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 124.
THE DONOHUE FAMILY
    Arnold, Pandemic 1918 , 126.
DONOHUE FAMILY LEDGERS
    Arnold, Pandemic 1918 , 126–127.
DC PUTSCH
    The title “DC Putsch” is a reference to the Beer Hall Putsch, or Munich Putsch, a failed coup d’état by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, on November 8 and 9, 1923. After this coup, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason.
THE SOLDIERS (OR PLUMMER)
    During the First World War, the US Army was still racially segregated. Most African American service personnel were placed in noncombativeroles, separate from whites. Over 100 Black physicians served as US Army Medical Corps officers, along with 12 Black dental officers, 639 Black infantry officers, and 400,000 Black enlisted men. Fourteen Black women served as navy clerks. Discriminatory administrative barriers prevented trained African American nurses from joining the war effort, but the public health crisis of the 1918 epidemic finally allowed eighteen Black nurses to be the first of their race ever to serve in the Army Nurse Corp during the epidemic and the war’s aftermath.
    “Roy Underwood Plummer”: “Cpl. Roy Underwood Plummer’s World War I Diary,” Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, last modified June 17, 2021, https://transcription.si.edu/project/26177 .
    “dutifully kept a diary”: Douglas Remley, “In Their Own Words: Diaries and Letters by African American Soldiers,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, last modified May 18, 2020, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/collection/in-their-own-words .
    “Most African American service personnel”: “African Americans in the Military during World War I,” National Archives, last modified August 28, 2020, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/war .
    “finally allowed eighteen Black nurses”: Marian Moser Jones and Matilda Saines, “The Eighteenth of 1918–1919: Black Nurses and the Great Flu Pandemic in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 6 (June 2019): 878.
WAR: WHAT, IS IT GOOD?
    The title “War: What, Is It Good?” is a play on the song “War” by Edwin Starr, from the 1970 album War & Peace .
    “The 1918 influenza killed”: Kenneth C. Davis, More Deadly Than War: The