Friday, Oct. 15, 2004

Neuharth honored by Native journalists
Tulsa Native American Times - Tulsa,OK,USA
... the impact of Neuharth's effort concerning Native American journalism is ... to both Native and non-Native newsrooms ... as the only public liberal arts university in ...

Folklife festival is Saturday, Sunday
Hannibal Courier Post - Hannibal,MO,USA
... of 88 artists and artisans - all displaying authentic historic arts and crafts ... choices of local work in addition to antiques, Native American items, women's ...

Festivals feature fall harvests
DetNews.com - Detroit,MI,USA
... Enjoy traditional dancing, chanting and drumming, plus storytelling, hands-on crafts, arts and crafts fair and Native-American foods, $7.50. ...

Tulsa Indian Actors to Produce Comedy
Tulsa Native American Times - Tulsa,OK,USA
... JR Mathews, a Governor's Arts Award winner and former Artistic Director of the American Indian Theater Company. Mathews spoke with the Native American Times on ...

New England Collectors and Collections
Maine Antique Digest - Waldoboro,ME,USA
... all sorts, not just those in museum studies and decorative arts programs, have ... New England, on the problematic practice of treating Native American relics as ...

Arlington High School guidance news
Arlington Advocate - Lexington,MA,United States
... and experience student life at a residential liberal arts college. ... will also be an ALANA (African American, Latina, Asian American, Native American) over night ...

Tibetan Film Festival comes to Ashland Oct. 15-16
Ashland Daily Press - Ashland,WI,USA
... of the American Indian Museum in Washington DC, will play Native American flutes. ... Northland College is an environmental liberal arts college located in Ashland ...

Out & About
Hagerstown Morning Herald - Hagerstown,MD,USA
... $8; $5 for Morgan Arts Council members; $2 for students and teachers on ... Also Native American artifact displays, hands-on crafts and Native American dancing. ...

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Essay: The other code talkers

The Spring 2002 issue of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian magazine contains an article by Martha Davidson entitled "Secret Warriors". The articles discusses code talkers from both World Wars I and II. Here is an excerpt from it: "In times of war, one of the most urgent military needs is for secure and instantaneous communications that cannot be understood by the enemy. Throughout the 20th century, military forces relied heavily on spoken language transmitted by telephone and radio, codes based on American Indian languages provided a means of communication that proved intelligible only to the men who developed and used them. These languages evolved in North America over thousands of years and were distinctly different from most languages of other continents, providing a unique and valuable source for the United States. The story of the Navajo code talkers, whose extraordinary system for encoding secret messages contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, has been popularized in books, television, and a new film, "Windtalkers". Yet few people are aware that the Navajo were not the only code talkers of the United States armed forces, nor even the first. World War I The first official use of an American Indian language-based code by the U.S. military was in 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, toward the end of the First World War. The 142nd Infantry Regiment (which included a company of Indians who among them spoke 26 different languages or dialects) was operating in an area from which the Germans had just retreated. Convinced that their communications lines were tapped, Capt. E.W. Horner selected 14 Choctaws to transmit messages. Because the Choctaw language lacked certain military terms, they invented code words. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Battalions, for example, were identified in Choctaw as one, two, or three grains of corn; a machine gun was "little gun shoot fast." Using the code, they ordered troop operations in the campaign. In his report, the commanding officer, Col. A.W. Block, said: "The enemy's complete surprise is evidence that he could not decipher messages ... The results were very gratifying." Following that successful experiment, other Indians in the American Expeditionary Force - Cheyenne, Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, and Yankton Sioux - were called on to use their languages for field communications." Commanche Code Talkers In 1940, foreseeing that the United States would be drawn into World War II, William Karty, a Comanche who was the director of the Fort Cobb Indian Conservation Corps camp in Oklahoma, proposed to the Army that the Comanche language be used for communications. The idea was attributed to his wife, who probably was not aware of the earlier use of Choctaw. The Army was receptive and authorized Karty to recruit volunteers for a special mission. The two requirements, beyond their fitness for the Army, were that they be unmarried and fluent in Comanche as well as English. Karty found 20 qualified men, and they were assigned to the 4th Signal Corps Company, 4th Infantry Division. They began training at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1941. Because most of the men had attended government boarding Indian schools with military-style discipline (where they were often punished for speaking their native language), they amazed their drill sergeant with their mastery of Army skills. "The drill sergeant put us out there and was going to have some fun with a bunch of raw recruits," recalled Rodrick Red Elk in a 1991 interview in the journal "Prairie Lore". "There were 16 of us that knew exactly what commands he was going to give and we knew how to march ... We were supposed to take six weeks of that basic training but I think they kicked us out of there in three weeks." Only after completing basic training were they told of their special mission. For the remainder of the year, they were sent to other Army camps up and down the East Coast for advanced communications work and amphibious training - from Georgia to Florida, to New Jersey and South Carolina and back again. During that time, they met weekly with their platoon leader, a West Point graduate named Hugh Foster, to devise codes for about 250 military terms that had no Comanche equivalents. Comanche at that time was purely a spoken language with no alphabet or dictionary, and to complicate matters, the code talkers represented several different bands of the Comanche nation, each with its own dialect. Red Elk later described (Comanche Newsletter, May 1993) the process of code development: 'For instance, a gun, we have only one name for a gun ... "tah-wah." So we had to make up names for artillery, machine guns, bazookas and all that. There's no ... name in the Comanche language for "tank." So we came up with the word "turtle" ["wa-ka-ray"] because a tank has a hard shell and a turtle has got a hard shell.'" ... The article goes on to mention that Comanche code talkers were present at Utah Beach on D-Day and that they partipated in four other major campaigns in France, Ardennes (the Battle of the Bulge), Rhineland, and Central Europe. Further, "although the Comanche and Navajo code talkers were the only officially trained and designated code talkers in World War II, instances have been reported of code talking (using Indian languages, often with improvised code words) by soldiers from at least 15 other tribes ... Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek, Kiowa, Menominee, Oneida, Pawnee, Lakota, Dakota, and Winnebago soldiers also used their languages and ingenuity for secure telecommunications in the Second World War."
Contribution from the SnipeList