In 1917, a Choctaw Indian named Joseph Oklahombi walked 21 miles from his home in Wright City, Oklahoma, to Idabel, the McCurtain County seat, to enlist in the U.S. Army.
Oklahombi enlisted at a time when most Native Americans were not considered U.S. citizens—that didn’t happen until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
The U.S. government wanted him to forget his history, his culture, and his native language, but that didn’t prevent him from fighting for his homeland in World War I.
Shortly after he enlisted, Oklahombi and 19 other Choctaw men became part of an effort that used their language to help win the war for the Allies.
They became code talkers—Native American soldiers who used tribal languages to confound enemy intelligence.
On May 22, they were honored by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, which dedicated a sculpture to the memory of the World War I code talkers outside the Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant, Oklahoma.
“This monument honors our brave Choctaw warriors whose extraordinary service helped bring an end to a devastating war,” Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton said at the ceremony.
The bronze sculpture depicts three World War I era soldiers. Two of them use a field telephone and notepad to send and receive message traffic in the Choctaw language, while a third stands guard.
On the bronze notepad is a message in the Choctaw language requesting more “corn”—code for soldiers.
Choctaw artist Jane Semple Umsted, who has produced many works for the Choctaw Nation, wanted the work to show the courage and dedication exemplified by the Choctaw code talkers.
“I wanted ... not just a sculpture of soldiers. I wanted [it] to be a depiction of the soldiers in action,” Umsted told The Epoch Times.
Action on the part of the code talkers is credited with saving potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, at a time when the Germans’ ability to listen in on communications and break codes was a major challenge for the Allied forces.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, approximately 12,000 Native Americans volunteered to serve. Of those, a select group were placed on front lines and at command posts to transmit military messages in their native languages.
Many of those soldiers had been students in government schools designed to assimilate them into white society, according to the website for the National Museum of the United States Army. They spoke English in those schools and, in some cases, were punished for speaking their native languages.
Brig. Gen. Richard Pratt had founded the first Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Pratt said his aim was not to kill Indians, but to exterminate their culture.
“All the Indian there is in the race should be dead,” Pratt was quoted as saying. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
The languages that Pratt and others wanted the students to forget became instrumental in preserving the government that was trying to erase them, according to the Army museum website.
Cherokees were the first Native Americans to be used as code talkers, but the Choctaw are the most well documented, with numerous news reports, photographs, and official correspondence describing their work.
They paved the way for the use of other Native American languages in World War I and future conflicts.
The original 20 Choctaw code talkers were Victor Brown, James Edwards, Otis Leader, Solomon Louis, Walter Veach, Tobias Frazier, Robert Taylor, Jeff Wilson, Calvin Wilson, Mitchell Bobb, Pete Maytubby, Ben Carterby, Ben Colbert, Noel Johnson, Albert Billy, Benjamin Hampton, Joseph Oklahombi, Joseph Davenport, George Davenport, and Jonas Durant.
A Man ‘Full of Character’
Oklahombi’s descendants say that he was proud to defend his homeland, regardless of the U.S. government’s efforts to stamp out his native language and customs.They never got to meet the man who made his living as a farmer, carpenter, and—possibly—a bootlegger. Still, they said he is remembered by those who knew him as a man of integrity and courage.
“He was a man that was full of character, and he believed in doing the right thing,” Oklahombi’s great-great-great-nephew Lee Watkins told The Epoch Times.
“He would do whatever it was for his country, even though his country didn’t recognize who [the Choctaws] were.”
According to information from the Choctaw Nation, Oklahombi had an exemplary war record. He was part of a contingent of 24 men who captured 171 Germans from Oct. 11 to Oct. 18 in the Champagne region of France in 1918.
In that battle, Oklahombi reportedly crossed about 200 yards of open ground to capture a German machine gun position. He then turned the gun on the enemy troops which enabled the Americans to hold the Germans until they surrendered four days later.
For his bravery, Oklahombi was awarded the Citation Star, the Victory Ribbon, and the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star.
‘A Giving, Loving Heart’
Margaret McWilliams of Oklahoma City drove to Durant for the statue’s unveiling to honor her grandfather Calvin Wilson. She remembers Wilson as a neat, reserved, and kind man who didn’t talk much about his military service. She said that the code talkers were instructed not to talk about their work.McWilliams said she believes that her grandfather answered the call to serve, despite the discrimination that Indians were subjected to, because he felt that there was much more at stake.
“They were there for our country, not for our government,” McWilliams told The Epoch Times.
Batton said the code talkers exemplified qualities that Choctaws, and all Americans, should strive to obtain: resilience, strength, forgiveness, and love.
‘Stop Making Up Stories’
Lisa Johnson Billy, a Choctaw tribal member, was an Oklahoma state representative from 2006 to 2016. She said there are still people who would like to ignore Indian history and culture.
Billy said that when she introduced legislation to honor the Choctaw code talkers, she met resistance from other lawmakers who didn’t believe the story.
“In conversations with my colleagues at the state capitol, I literally had some of them tell me to stop making up stories about those Indians,” Billy told The Epoch Times.
But according to the historical record, those stories are true.
Barely one year after entering the war, the 30th Infantry Division found its messages, transmitted in plain English, were intercepted by the Germans. Enemy troops were gaining a great advantage on the battlefield.
Soldiers of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians began sending messages in their native tongue for the 105th Field Artillery Battalion. The inability of the Germans to break the Indian “code” helped turn the advantage back to the Americans and their allies.
Choctaw soldiers from the 142nd and 143rd Infantries helped commanders move units, coordinate operations, and exchange important information. This included organizing a surprise artillery attack at the end of October 1918 that secured an important win for the 36th Infantry Division.
Reconciling Old and New
The code talkers had to meet the challenge of reconciling ancient language with modern society.Most Indian languages had no words for military terms. So, “fast shooting gun,” was used for “machine gun.” Battalion was changed to “twice big group,“ and “big gun” meant field artillery.
Choctaw code talker James Edwards is credited with devising many of these terms.
The U.S. Army code talkers used several tribal languages in World War I, including Cheyenne, Cherokee, Comanche, Ho-Chunk, Osage, and Yankton Sioux.
The strategy was so effective that the German regime attempted to sabotage the program as it prepared for what became World War II, sending spies to the United States to study tribal dialects and crafting propaganda that argued that Native Americans should not sign up for the draft.
Those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and code talkers went on to play an important role in World War II, the Korean War, and in Vietnam.
