There is a monument on the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma dedicated to the Comanche Spirit Talkers today. This was true also for the messages that were sent by General George Patton to his troops as they engaged in battles with the retreating German forces. One of the most interesting facts you will hear here is that the first messages from the beaches on D-Day at Normandy were sent using Comanche Code. While the Navajo Code Talkers are the best known for their worked with the Marines in the Pacific, the Comanche “Spirit Talkers” did the same work for the Army in Europe and you will hear some of that here. Comanche Nation Congressional Gold Medal. But the most well known, of course, are the Code Talkers. WWII would see tens of thousands of Native Americans serving in the various military services. This would seem ironic itself, given their history with the American government over the history of this country. There is no other ethnic group in this country that can match the percapita participation in the military services of the United States than Native Americans. One can imagine, too, that those Comanche speakers, and all of the other Native American speakers, saw the irony and took delight in refreshing their language skills and honing them for that purpose. One can imagine the irony of coming out of those Indian Schools where they were told to forget their language to now being called to use it for the purposes of communicating the most important military communications in a way that would confuse and confound the enemy. When they went into the Army, they impressed their drill instructors with their ability to march so well, at their discipline. As you will hear in the video, they were taught to make their beds there and how to march. The Comanche warriors, Spirit Talkers, in this video were raised on the Ft. Comanche War Chief Quanah Parker and his wife in 1911. He was the last of the great warrior chiefs who would see the end of the Comanche days of freedom and would end his life on a reservation at Ft. Texans know that name and the history surrounding it. Much of the book told the story of Quanah Parker, a war leader of the Kwahadi (Antelope) band of the Comanche. They were a horse people that controlled and roamed freely over great swaths of the southwest, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and into Mexico. I read a book a while back called “The Empire of the Summer Moon,” which was a great history of the Comanche People. This video is about the Comanche speakers who helped were an important part of the victory in the European Theater of WWII. One of those languages was that spoken by the great warrior tribe of the southern plains, the Comanche. But many other tribal languages and Native speakers were also called upon. They were the largest group of Native language speakers who were called upon to be Code Talkers. Their effectiveness with the Marines in the Pacific is legendary and with good reason. We know of the famous Navajo Code Talkers. Comanche code-talkers of the 4th Signal Company (U.S. As history and irony would have it, the speakers of those Native languages would be called upon to help the United States and allies win the war. WWII came along and the necessity to be able to put important military messages into codes that could not be broken by the enemy, either the German or the Japanese enemy, became an immediate priority. The result was that many Native languages were lost to history.īut there is an irony in this story. They were often punished for speaking their native languages in these schools as well. Tribes in every corner of this country were forced onto reservations and during much of the 20th century the young were sent to government run boarding schools where they were to be “acculturated” into American culture. That loss included being gradually and forcibly removed from their ancient homelands, the loss of their cultural heritage and ultimately the loss of their language. Native American history since the arrival of Europeans has been a long story of loss.
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