by Andrea Scrima
Cherokee, Cree, Meskwaki, Comanche, Assiniboine, Mohawk, Muscogee, Navajo, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Tlingit, Hopi, Crow, Chippewa-Oneida—well into the twentieth century, the majority of America’s indigenous languages were spoken by only a very few outsiders, largely the children of missionaries who grew up on reservations. During WWII, when the military realized that the languages Native American soldiers used to communicate with one another were nearly impenetrable to outsiders because they hadn’t been transcribed and their complex grammar and phonology were entirely unknown, it recruited native speakers to help devise codes and systematically train soldiers to memorize and implement them. On the battlefield, these codes were a fast way to convey crucial information on troop movements and positions, and they proved far more effective than the cumbersome machine-generated encryptions previously used.
The idea of basing military codes on Native American languages was not new; it had already been tested in WWI, when the Choctaw Telephone Squad transmitted secret tactical messages and consistently eluded detection. Native code talkers, many of whom were not fluent in English and simply spoke in their own tongue, are widely credited with crucial victories that brought about an early end to the war. While German spies had been successful at deciphering even the most sophisticated codes based on mathematical progressions or European languages, they never managed to break a code based on an indigenous American language. Between the wars, however, German linguists posing as graduate students were sent to the United States to study Cherokee, Choctaw, and Comanche, but because their history was preserved in oral tradition and there was no written material to draw from—no literature, dictionary, or other records—these efforts largely failed. Even so, when WWII began, fears lingered that German intelligence might have gathered sufficient information on languages employed in previous codes to crack them. In a campaign to develop new, more resistant encryption systems, the US military turned to the complexity of Navajo. Read more »
I moved to Berlin in 1984, but have rarely written about my experiences living in a foreign country; now that I think about it, it occurs to me that I lived here as though in exile those first few years, or rather as though I’d been banished, as though it hadn’t been my own free will to leave New York. It’s difficult to speak of the time before the Wall fell without falling into cliché—difficult to talk about the perception non-Germans had of the city, for decades, because in spite of the fascination Berlin inspired, it was steeped in the memory of industrialized murder and lingering fear and provoked a loathing that was, for some, quite visceral. Most of my earliest friends were foreigners, like myself; our fathers had served in World War II and were uncomfortable that their children had wound up in former enemy territory, but my Israeli and other Jewish friends had done the unthinkable: they’d moved to the land that had nearly extinguished them, learned to speak in the harsh consonants of the dreaded language, and betrayed their family and its unspeakable sufferings, or so their parents claimed. We were drawn to the stark reality of a walled-in, heavily guarded political enclave, long before the reunited German capital became an international magnet for start-ups and so-called creatives. We were the generation that had to justify itself for being here. It was hard not to be haunted by the city’s past, not to wonder how much of the human insanity that had taken place here was somehow imbedded in the soil—or if place is a thing entirely indifferent to us, the Earth entirely indifferent to the blood spilled on its battlegrounds.