Person

Ola Mildred Rexroat

Ola Rexroat, WASP 1944 Classbook Photograph

Image Courtesy of WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX

Despite facing a double burden of racism and sexism, Ola “Millie” Rexroat became the only Native American known to serve as a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) during World War II.

Early Life & South Dakota Roots

Ola Mildred Rexroat was born in Argonia, Kansas in 1917. “But I really am from Pine Ridge Reservation out near Wakpamni Lake, Wakpamni,” Rexroat explained. Her mother grew up on the reservation located in South Dakota. For a time, Rexroat lived there with her grandmother, who was Oglala Lakota. Rexroat felt a deep connection to her ancestors, some of whom were linked to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.[1]

Rexroat’s father, a white man, frequently moved the family all over the country for his work as a newspaper printer and editor. Rexroat never left behind this life in motion. She moved constantly, trying to find a place in the world at a time when few choices were open to women and those with Native ancestry. She moved back to South Dakota her senior year of high school to attend St. Mary's Episcopal School for Indian Girls. The next year, she attended college in Nebraska but disliked how they forced her to take home economics classes. She returned to South Dakota to attend another year of college before taking time off to earn money.[2]

During her time away from college, Rexroat did typing and administrative work for the Indian Service, what is now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In a private sector that discriminated against Native peoples, the Indian Service offered Native Americans the possibility of economic improvement and employment opportunities normally denied to them.[3]

Rexroat earned enough money to move to New Mexico, where she completed a college degree in art at the University of New Mexico in 1938. After graduating, she continued to work for the Indian Service on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Around 1941, she decided to join her mother and two sisters in Washington, D.C., where they were working for war agencies that sprung up to support the World War II war effort.[4]

Becoming a WASP

Once again, Rexroat found herself “behind a typewriter,” a situation she hoped to avoid. Fortunately, she landed a job working for the U.S. Engineers building airfields in El Paso, Texas. This gave her the idea to learn to fly, even though she had never learned to drive. When she tried to take flight lessons, though, she was told she could not unless she owned her own plane, was in the civil air patrol, or was going to be a WASP. When she asked what a WASP was, she learned it stood for the Women Airforce Service Pilots. She decided then that she would become a WASP.[5]

Rexroat spent her hard-earned wages and days off taking flight lessons until she had reached the thirty-five hours she needed to apply to the WASP program. She was working for the Army War College in 1944 when she received her orders to report for training in Sweetwater, Texas. She was twenty-three years old and ecstatic to fly military airplanes. First, she and other underweight trainees had to “eat a lot of fattening foods” and “put sand in our shoes and socks” to make the weight requirement. Once she passed, Rexroat excelled at training.[6]

“What could be better?” the quotation below Rexroat’s WASP yearbook photograph asked. While her mother held concerns, Rexroat’s two sisters agreed and supported her decision to become a WASP. Some 800 Native women served in the U.S. military and thousands more worked on the home front in war-related industries, often finding better wages and new opportunities. [7]

After earning her silver wings, the WASP assigned Rexroat to Eagle Pass Army Air Base at the border of Texas and Mexico. She primarily towed targets for aerial gunnery practice. Taking off, she would tow a large fabric target behind her plane. Male pilots – flying the same planes, but with live ammunition – shot at her targets to practice their aim. It was dangerous work that sometimes resulted in terrible accidents. Luckily, the worst Rexroat experienced was, on two occasions, losing the target she towed when the cable holding it was shot.[8]

Despite the dangerous work, Rexroat felt fortunate. The commander at her base, she explained “liked WASPs and thought they did a good job of flying and he even requested more.” Most WASPs were not so lucky and experienced discrimination and hostility from the men they worked with. Rexroat knew that prejudice against women was common, but she did not let it worry her until the prejudice contributed to the disbandment of the WASP program. [9]

Disbandment and Loss

When Rexroat learned Congress was disbanding the WASP in late 1944, she and her fellow pilots “were just devastated because all of us that were there…were enjoying our assignment and we wanted to keep on flying as long as we could.” Rexroat believed she was going to be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps as her orders to report to training stated. Instead, the government would not grant former WASPs veteran status until 1977.[10]

As Rexroat weathered this personal loss, the Oglala Lakota who remained on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation experienced loss on a large scale. During the war, the U.S. Department of War and Army Air Force took possession of approximately 840,000 acres of Native American tribal lands for military use. Over 300,000 acres came from the Pine Ridge Reservation, which the government falsely claimed was useless and empty land – to make a bombing range for military training. Some landowners received a small compensation for their land and had to relocate within 10 days. Those who refused to move reportedly had their land condemned and were not given compensation. The land was not returned to the Oglala Lakota until 1968 and remains littered with unexploded cartridges and bombs despite clean-up efforts. Today, the National Park Service co-manages with the Oglala Lakota Tribe a small portion of this land, the aerial gunnery range, as part of the South Unit of the Badlands National Park.[11]

Rexroat remembered her short time as a WASP during WWII with great fondness. She likened the women of the WASP program to the Lakota people – “among the best people in the world.” She remained close to many former WASPs throughout her life, sharing with them both the thrill to fly and pride over doing something significant to help the war effort.[12]

Rexroat also imbued her time as a WASP with great significance. Looking back decades later, she claimed the experience changed her life:

“It gave me a lot of confidence in myself, my decisions and my ability to learn and use my learning afterwards, because I had been very unsure of myself. And was more or less afraid to make decisions on my own, but I knew that I had to earn a living because nobody else was able to support me. My father was dead and my mother was working; my sisters were both working, but they had themselves to take care of. So, it just seemed like if anybody was gonna take care of me, it was gonna be me.”[13]

Air Traffic Control and Legacies

After Congress deactivated the WASP, Rexroat put her newfound confidence, skills, and WASP network to great use. Eventually, she became one of the first women air traffic controllers. She started in San Antonio, where frustratingly, she watched less qualified men be promoted over her. After a stint with the Air Force Reserves as a fighter inceptor controller at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she returned to her civilian job with the Federal Aviation Administration in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She remained there as an air traffic controller until her retirement in the late 1970s.[14]

Despite her love for flying, Rexroat only flew when she could afford to rent a plane, which was a rare occasion. She enjoyed watching a niece follow in her footsteps by learning to fly. Rexroat also served two terms as chapter president of the New Mexico branch of the North American Women’s Indian Association, where she connected with other Native women veterans.[15]

In 2009, President Obama signed a bill awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to former WASPs. In 2017, just two months shy of her one-hundredth birthday, Millie Rexroat passed away while living at the Veterans Home in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Her son, Forest R. McDonald, had her ashes interred at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Former WASPs only gained this right in 2016 with the passage of HR-4336.[16]

A few months after Rexroat’s death, the Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota renamed an airfield operations building the “Millie Rexroat Building.” At the ceremony, her son expressed an essential lesson from his mother’s life when he shared what he learned from her. “If you really want to do something, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t just because of who or what you are. It wasn’t something she ever said to me, it’s just who she was.”[17]

Notes

[1] Ola Mildred Rexroat, “Ola Mildred Rexroat: An Oral History,” by Patricia Jernigan, Texas Woman’s University (2006), 1. (“Rexroat interview” hereafter). For more about Rexroat’s family connection to Wounded Knee through the story of Lost Bird, see 14-15. Today, the Wounded Knee Massacre site is a National Historic Landmark.
[2] Rexroat interview, 1-2.
[3] For the role of Native Americans in the Indian Service, see Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers : A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
[4] Mari K. Eder, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2021), 369. Rexroat interview, 2.
[5] On never learning to drive, see Jim Kent, “A Conversation with One of the Last Surviving WASPs,” South Dakota Public Broadcasting, August 8, 2009. Rexroat interview, 2.
[6] Rexroat interview, 2-3, 13.
[7] Quotation from Eder, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line, 373. Rexroat interview, 12. “Native Women and World War II,” Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian.
[8] Rexroat interview, 3, 5-6.
[9] Rexroat interview, 3. Steve Long, “World War II WASP: Ola Mildred Rexroat,” KEVN TV, March 1, 2016.
[10] Rexroat interview, 7.
[11] William C. Meadows, “On Dangerous Ground: Oglala Lakota Land Used as a Bombing Range in World War II is Still Perilous,” American Indian 24, no.3 (Fall 2023).
[12] Rexroat interview, 16. Kent, “A Conversation with One of the Last Surviving WASPs.”
[13] Rexroat interview, 14
[14] Ibid., 8-10.
[15] Ibid., 11. “Ola Mildred (Millie) Rexroat-McDonald,” Lakota Times, July 6, 2017. See also Alaina Beautiful Bald Eagle, “Millie Rexroat: A Pioneer for Women in Aviation and in Life,” West River Eagle, May 29, 2019.
[16] Eder, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line, 386-88. “Ola Mildred (Millie) Rexroat-McDonald.” Stephen Arionus, “Women Airforce Service Pilots and Their Fight for Veteran Status,” Air Force, November 11, 2021.
[17] Airman 1st Class Donald C. Knechtel, “Ellsworth Airfield Ops Building Renamed in Honor of Fallen WASP,” Ellsworth Air Force Base, October 2, 2017. Eder, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line, 389.

Sources

Arionus, “Women Airforce Service Pilots and Their Fight for Veteran Status,” Air Force, November 11, 2021. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2838960.
Beautiful Bald Eagle, Alaina. “Millie Rexroat: A Pioneer for Women in Aviation and in Life.” West River Eagle, May 29, 2019. Millie Rexroat: A pioneer for women in aviation and in life - West River Eagle.
Cahill, Cathleen. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Eder, Mari K. The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II. Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2021.
Kent, Jim. “A Conversation with One of the Last Surviving WASPs.” South Dakota Public Broadcasting, August 8, 2009. https://sdpb.sd.gov/newsite/shows.aspx?MediaID=48354&Parmtype=RADIO&ParmAccessLevel=sdpb-all.
Knechtel, Airman 1st Class Donald C. “Ellsworth Airfield Ops Building Renamed in Honor of Fallen WASP.” Ellsworth Air Force Base, October 2, 2017. https://www.ellsworth.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1331789/.
Long, Steve. World War II WASP: Ola Mildred Rexroat (Aired March 1, 2016 on KEVN TV).
Meadows, William C. “On Dangerous Ground: Oglala Lakota Land Used as a Bombing Range in World War II is Still Perilous.” American Indian 24, no.3 (Fall 2023). On Dangerous Ground: Oglala Lakota Land Used as a Bombing Range in World War II is Still Perilous | NMAI Magazine.
The National Archives in Washington, DC; Washington, DC, USA; Indian Census Rolls, 1885-1940; Series: National Archives Microfilm Publication M595, 692 rolls; NAID: 595276; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75.
“Native Women and World War II.” Why We Serve: Native Americans in the United States Armed Forces. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian. Native Women and World War II.
“Ola Mildred (Millie) Rexroat-McDonald.” Lakota Times, July 6, 2017. Ola Mildred (Millie) Rexroat-McDonald - Lakota Times.
Rexroat, Ola Mildred. “Ola Mildred Rexroat: An Oral History.” By Patricia Jernigan. Texas Woman’s University, 2006.

Article by Nicole Martin, PhD, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education. This article was funded by the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service.