Ryan Booth featured in film documentary

Ryan Booth can check several boxes on his resume: National Park Service ranger, Washington State University assistant professor of history, and Fulbright Scholar, to name a few.

Now add film star to the list.

Booth, a 1995 La Conner High School graduate, provides expert commentary in several segments of a new documentary about Black soldiers who served in the U.S. Army more than a century ago.

“Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting on Two Fronts” premiered last weekend at the Seattle International Film Festival. It chronicles the story of Black army regiments formed after the Civil War that played vital roles in the history of the American western frontier.

Booth, whose research focuses on U.S. Army Indian scouts of that era, appears throughout the film. He addresses the military history of U.S. Indian Wars and interactions between the Buffalo Soldiers and Native American scouts.

“Both the Buffalo Soldiers and the Indian scouts were created by an act of Congress in 1866 and essentially acted as the constabulary for the west up until the advent of World War I,” Booth told Will Ferguson of WSU News and Media Relations. “The conundrum in all of this is why did Black and native men take up arms to serve the country that had oppressed them for centuries?”

It is a difficult question for which even Booth doesn’t have a definitive answer.

“I’m not sure I’ve adequately figured that out myself,” he told the Weekly News Friday. “But I’ll keep chipping away at it.”

Booth visited India on his Fulbright scholarship, where he studied and compared the roles of natives there who served in the British military with the service of U.S. Indian scouts.

Booth’s best explanation for Native Americans joining the U.S. Army during the period of westward expansion is that the federal government was able to exploit rivalries between tribes.

“If you went against the federal government, things could go very badly for you,” Booth said in a recent WSU Insider interview.

He said both Black and Native men joined the army to survive in a harsh, fast-changing world. Natives had been forced to abandon their lands and traditional lifestyles. Blacks were emancipated from slavery but freed without property or resources.

“By working for the federal government, you were at least guaranteed steady pay once a month in gold or silver coin,” Booth wrote in an article for Washington State Magazine last year.

A member of the Upper Skagit Tribe who resided on Swinomish Reservation while attending La Conner schools, Booth noted that the insignia of the Indian scouts has in modern times been adopted by U.S. Army Special Forces.

“Both the Indian scouts and the Buffalo Soldiers have been waiting a long time for their story to be told,” Booth said in Ferguson’s WSU Insider article.

“My hope is that this documentary gives people a better understanding of their contributions to their country as well as the contradictory nature of their service.”