The Indian Who Raised The Flag: An Examination of the Legacy of Ira Hayes, 1945- Present

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which socio-cultural depictions of Akimel O’odham veteran Ira Hayes have changed over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Captured in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic 1945 photograph as one of the six Marines who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima during World War II, Hayes was transformed into a mythological being that became a source of contention between White Americans and Indigenous Peoples. Through popular media, White Americans sought to reconcile Hayes’s active participation in the flag-raising with their own socio-cultural understandings of where Indigenous Peoples fit within the American nation. Indigenous Peoples, meanwhile, saw Hayes as an example of the sacrifices they had made for the United States, and demanded the right to tell his story on their own terms. By analyzing various forms of popular media, including newspapers, magazine articles, songs, and films, this work frames popular imaginings of Ira Hayes within the context of the greater White-Indigenous relationship in the late twentieth century, and explores how these depictions of one man became part of a wider, ongoing socio-cultural conflict over race and citizenship in the United States.