Winning Design Selected For New Native American Veterans Memorial 

By Mikaela Lefrak
via the WAMU radio web site

When Harvey Pratt got the call telling him he’d been selected to design a new memorial to Native American veterans in Washington, D.C., he was in shock.

“My wife and I just sat there looking at one another, like, what do we do now? What’s going to happen?” Pratt said.

Harvey Pratt lives in Guthrie, OK. He spent over 50 years working in law enforcement and creating art in his off-hours.On Tuesday morning, June 26, the National Museum of the American Indian made the public announcement about Pratt’s selection, freeing him to finally share the good news with his community in Oklahoma. He’s a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, and a Southern Cheyenne chief.

Pratt’s design, entitled “Warriors Circle of Honor,” was selected out of an initial pool of 120 submissions. A jury whittled them down to five finalists, and then chose Pratt’s unanimously. The memorial will be located on museum grounds, just off the National Mall.

“Most Americans, and people around the world, are not aware of this very strong tradition of service in the military by Native Americans,” said Rebecca Trautmann, the memorial project curator for the American Indian Museum.

Native people serve in the U.S. Military at a higher per capita rate than any other ethnic group. More than 154,000 Native American veterans are alive today, according to the 2010 census.

Pratt is a veteran himself. He enlisted in the Marines in 1962 after his first year of college (“it wasn’t going well”) and shipped out to Vietnam in the spring of 1963.

He said he made the decision to join the military so that he could follow in the footsteps of his uncle, who served in World War II and the Korean War. “He’d been wounded so many times and has so much shrapnel in his body,” Pratt said. “He just carried on. He’s a real warrior.”

Pratt said he hopes his memorial design will make native veterans who served in any of the military’s five branches feel welcome. “Native people, we’re the same, but we’re different,” he explained.

Read the entire article on the WAMU web site here:

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