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  • Memorializing Mathew Juan:The Akimel O'odham, the Cult of the Fallen Soldier, and the Politics of Commemoration after World War I
  • John Mack (bio)

On April 9, 1921, the body of Mathew Juan, the first Arizonan killed in World War I, was reburied in a formal ceremony at the Presbyterian Church in Sacaton. According to the Arizona Blade-Tribune reporter who covered the event, "a very solemn and impressive military funeral was held at the Presbyterian Indian Mission at Sacaton, where the remains of Private Matthew B. Rivers [Juan] were laid in their final resting place." The Casa Grande Valley Dispatch also reported on the event, noting that "Indians representing seventeen tribes" gathered at the church from early in the morning until there "were nearly 1,000 present to pay their last respects to their fallen hero."1

The commemoration of Juan's death exemplifies what scholars have termed "the cult of the fallen soldier." By 1921, Anglo politicians and journalists in Arizona subsumed Juan's personal [End Page 55] identity within a national identity as part of a larger effort to give state-sanctioned meaning to the mass casualties of the First World War; they sublimated his Indigenous ancestry in the construction of a national historical narrative. Over the course of the 1920s, the remembrance of Juan as a "Pima Indian" who died for his country was replaced by that of Juan as the "first Arizonan" killed in the Great War.2

Mathew Juan was born in San Tan on April 22, 1892, to Joseph and Mary B. Juan of the Akimel O'odham tribe.3 Juan's family later moved to Sacaton, where he spent his early childhood. As a teenager, Juan moved to Riverside, California, where he enrolled in the Indian school known as the Sherman Institute. After Juan completed his studies in agriculture at the institute, he returned to the Gila River Indian Reservation to work in the experimental field station, which had been established in 1906. While little is known about his day-to-day life, contemporary newspaper accounts reported that Juan was a celebrated athlete and an accomplished rodeo competitor who excelled at calf roping. It was perhaps this ability that enabled him to find work with a traveling Ringling Brothers circus, which came to Phoenix in September 1917. While Juan was on tour with the circus in Texas, he voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Army on November 26, 1917.4

After completing his basic training in Texas, the army sent Juan to Hoboken, New Jersey, for additional training. From there, with two thousand other soldiers, he boarded the S.S. Tuscania, a luxury ocean liner converted to a troop ship that was en route to France. On February 5, 1918, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the ship, killing 210 passengers. Juan was among the survivors who continued on to France where he was assigned to the Twenty-Eighth Infantry of the U.S. Army's First Division, which was organized for duty on June 8, 1917. The First Division won the first U.S. victory [End Page 56] in World War I at the Battle of Cantigny. In this battle, on May 28, 1917, the First Division attacked and defeated German forces that had taken control of the small village of Cantigny, north of Paris. The fighting was fierce, and more than a thousand U.S. soldiers died during the battle. Mathew Juan was one of those causalities.5

Like many other soldiers who died in the war, Juan was originally buried in a makeshift grave near the place where he had been killed. By the end of the war, remains of fallen soldiers were buried in 2,400 cemeteries across Europe, mostly in France. A growing number of Gold Star families—those that lost family members during battle—were concerned that their loved ones who had died in the war had been unceremoniously buried in unmarked and untended graves. Members of these families pressured the government for the repatriation of the bodies of the fallen. The end result of this political agitation was the return of the remains of roughly eighty thousand soldiers, which cost the U.S...

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