During the sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians. Because of that, how could anyone recognize that my father was making a social statement?
But there is evidence, a photograph of my father demonstrating in Spokane, Washington, during the Vietnam war. the photograph made it onto the wire service and was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. In fact, it was on the cover of Time.
In the photograph, my father is dressed in bell-bottoms and flowered shirt, his hair in braids, with red peace symbols splashed across his face like war paint. In his hands my father holds a rifle above his head, captured in that moment just before he proceeded to beat the sh** out of the National Guard private lying prone on the ground. A fellow demonstrator holds a sign that it just barely visible over my father's left shoulder. It read MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.
The photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and editors across the country had a lot of fun creating captions and headlines. I've read many of them collected in my father's scrapbook, and my favorite was run in the Seattle Times. The caption under the photograph read DEMONSTRATOR GOES TO WAR FOR PEACE. The editors capitalized on my father's Native American identity with other headlines like ONE WARRIOR AGAINST WAR and PEACEFUL GATHERING TURNS INTO NATIVE UPRISING.
Anyway, my father was arrested, charged with attempted murder, which was reduced to a**ault with a deadly weapon. It was a high-profile case so my father was used as an example. Convicted and sentenced quickly, he spent two years in Walla Walla State Penitentiary.