This volume, issued in a limited edition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day (6 June 1944), features chapters excerpted from a forthcoming (2020) book-length biography of Penobscot Indian Elder Charles Norman Shay of Indian Island, Maine. His life story, told partly in his own words, brings to light the mostly ignored or forgotten service and sacrifice made by Native American soldiers and their communities in WWII, the Korean War and Cold War. Zeroing in on D-Day - the beginning of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France - these sample chapters focus on Private Shay’s baptism by fire as a 19-year-old combat medic attached to an assault platoon in the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One. Struggling ashore at Omaha Beach as part of the first wave of attack in Operation Neptune, he treated and rescued countless comrades and was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry displayed that day. Woven into the narrative are stories representative of other front-line medics and the 500 fellow North American Indians who heroically participated in what is still the largest seaborne invasion in world history.
AUTHORS:
DR. HARALD E.L. PRINS (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Kansas State University) has published scores of articles, books and films. Son of a Dutch WWII resistance commander, in 2007 he began extensive research on North American Indian military history in Europe. Former Smithsonian Research Associate and Visiting Professor in Sweden, he has served as expert witness in indigenous rights cases in the U.S. Senate, U.S. Federal and Canadian courts.
BUNNY McBRIDE, journalist/author/anthropologist, has written about cultural survival and conservation issues worldwide. Her books on Charles Shay’s family and other Native Americans in Maine, include Women of the Dawn;
Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris;
Our Lives in Our Hands, and Princess Watahwaso: Bright Star of the Penobscot, plus two coauthored books with Harald Prins - Indians in Eden and Asticou’s Island Domain.