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A native American war hero gets the French Legion of honor award
Charles Shay went off to the wars more than 60 years ago and has now returned as a tribal elder, preserving Penobscot history.
By Todd Nelson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 5, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 3
Old Town, Maine - In a black frame on the wall in Charles Shay's tidy study is a tattered pink telegram. It's the War Department communiqué that his mother, Florence Shay, received in early March of 1945.
Her son was missing in action near Remagen, Germany.
It was two long months before a knock on her door in early May brought any further news:It was her son, himself. "I walked in and there was complete exultation, tears, hugging. She couldn't believe I was standing there in front of her," he recalls. He'd been liberated from a German POW camp and sent home.
That pink telegram hanging just below his silver star and four bronze battle stars from World War II and the Korean War, is one of the more humble markers in Mr. Shay's odyssey from the craggy rocks of his home on the Penobscot Indian Reservation to a long life abroad. But it is a powerful one for him: It marked the end of the constant combat the young Army medic had been in with the Big Red One – the famed infantry division that landed in the first deadly wave on Omaha Beach. He attributes his survival – through the D-Day chaos in which the citation for his silver star says he "repeatedly plunged into the treacherous sea and carried critically wounded men to saftey" – to his mother's prayers.
Sixty-three years after his heroic actions that day, Mrs. Shay's son will gather one more honor for his wall. On Nov. 6 he will become a Chevalier dans l'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur. It is given for "emminentservice to the French republique." French President Nicolas Sarkozy will bestow the award – which dates back to Napoleon – on Mr. Shay and six other American veterans in a Washington, D.C., ceremony.
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Shay, a Penobscot Indian who now lives on the Indian Island Reservation in a house beside a tall white shingled "tepee," has a rather unusual French ancestry of his own.
He is descended from Jean Vincent d'Abbadie, the third Baron de St. Castin, a French nobleman who married the daughter of the Penobscot chief, Madockawando, in 1670.
Though he spent most of his life abroad – distinguishing himself for bravery in World War II and the Korean War and then staying on in Europe to spend a career as a communications officer for the Atomic Energy Commission – it is his native American heritage of which Shay is proudest.
He is a Penobscot tribal elder – and when he and his wife began returning in the summertime to renovate a reservation house he inherited from his aunt, he says, "I began to pick up where I left off. I became quite active in trying to preserve the history of my family."
When he returned to live permanently in the US four years ago, he threw himself into historical and tribal work. Today, he spends his time recording his war experiences for a tribal archive, and sharing his family history. The tepee beside his house is a museum dedicated to Princess Watahwaso, the stage name of his late aunt, Lucy Nicolar Poolaw, a widely known interpreter of Indian music and dance. He has helped to reissue a famous book by his grandfather, Joseph Nicolar, titled "The Life and Traditions of the Red Man."
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