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Most people only know about the Navajo Code Talkers, but the story actually starts much earlier—and involves a lot more tribes than most people realize. In the final months of World War I, the U.S. Army in France was getting hammered by German interception of their communications. Runners were being captured or killed, phone lines tapped, codes broken. Then some officers overheard a handful of Choctaw soldiers from Oklahoma talking among themselves in their own language. That gave them an idea. In October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, a group of Choctaw men from the 36th Division became the first official code talkers. They started sending battlefield messages over the field telephones in Choctaw. The Germans couldn’t make sense of it. Other tribes were pulled in around the same time—Cherokee, Cheyenne, Comanche, Osage, Yankton Sioux, and even some Ho-Chunk. It was mostly Type 2 code talking (just speaking the language straight), though the Choctaws developed a few coded terms too. It worked so well that the idea stuck. When World War II came around, the military remembered. This time they got more organized about it. The Army started recruiting early. In late 1940 they brought in 17 Comanche men who developed a formal coded vocabulary of around 250 terms—tanks became “turtles,” machine guns became “sewing machine guns,” and Hitler got the name “Crazy White Man.” Thirteen of those Comanches landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the 4th Infantry Division and fought all the way across Europe. The code was never broken. Around the same time, the Army also used Meskwaki (Sac and Fox), Chippewa and Oneida speakers, Hopi, and others in smaller groups. Then came the Marines and the Navajo. In 1942, Philip Johnston (who’d grown up around the Navajo) convinced the Corps that the language could work. They brought in the first 29 Navajo recruits—the “Original 29”—who built a sophisticated code with hundreds of terms (eventually over 600). Fighter planes were hummingbirds, bombers were buzzards, submarines were iron fish. By the end of the war, somewhere around 400 Navajo had been trained as code talkers, and they served in every major Marine campaign in the Pacific. At Iwo Jima, one Marine officer famously said the island wouldn’t have been taken without them. Other tribes whose languages were used in WWII include Kiowa, Creek (Muscogee), Seminole, Pawnee, Crow, Assiniboine, Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Menominee, and more. In total, more than 30 Native nations contributed code talkers across both wars. After World War II the need faded fast. Modern encryption technology made spoken language codes less necessary. A few Navajo code talkers did some training exercises after the war, and some individuals served in Korea and Vietnam, but the formal programs effectively ended by the early 1950s. The irony isn’t lost on anyone: these men were asked to use the very languages that boarding schools had tried to beat out of them—and those same languages helped win two world wars. The codes were never broken. Pretty remarkable chapter of American history that still doesn’t get talked about enough outside the Navajo story.

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Inside Stailee Heard's (Seneca/Seminole/Mvskokw) 'chaotic' offseason #NativeAthlete #OSU #Big12 Read at: buff.ly/tqIiYwM