The Creation of American Indian Heritage Month

1
The Creation of American Indian Heritage Month

• What started at the turn of the century as an
  effort to gain a day of recognition for the
  significant contributions the first Americans
  made to the establishment and growth of the U.S.,
  has resulted in a whole month being designated
  for that purpose.

2
Early Proponents

• One of the very proponents of an American Indian
  Day was Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian,
  who was the director of the Museum of Arts and
  Science in Rochester, N.Y. He persuaded the Boy
  Scouts of America to set aside a day for the
  "First Americans" and for three years they
  adopted such a day.
• In 1915, the annual Congress of the American
  Indian Association meeting, formally approved a
  plan concerning American Indian Day. It directed
  its president, Rev. Sherman Coolidge, an
  Arapahoe, to call upon the country to observe
  such a day.

3
State Celebrations

• The first American Indian Day in a state was
  declared on the second Saturday in May 1916 by
  the governor of N.Y. Several states celebrate the
  fourth Friday in September.
• In Illinois, for example, legislators enacted
  such a day in 1919.
• Presently, several states have designated
  Columbus Day as Native American Day, but it
  continues to be a day we observe without any
  recognition as a national legal holiday.

4
American Indian Place Names

• Many American places have been named after Indian
  words. In fact, about half of the states got
  their names from Indian words.

5
American Indian Place Namescontinued

• Kentucky comes from an Iroquoian word
  (Kentahten), which means "land of tomorrow.
• Connecticut's name comes from the Mohican word
  (Quinnehtukqut), which means "beside the long
  tidal river."
• Manhattan (NY)--Algonquian, believed to mean
  "isolated thing in water."

• Arizona-- from the Indian "Arizonac," meaning
  "little spring" or "young spring."
• Kansas--from a Sioux word meaning "people of the
  south wind."
• Utah--from the Ute tribe, meaning "people of the
  mountains."

6
Navajo Code Talkers

• The Navajo code talkers took part in every
  assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific
  from 1942 to 1945. They served in all Marine
  divisions, transmitting messages by telephone and
  radio in their native languagea code that the
  Japanese never broke.

7
Why Navajo?

• The idea to use Navajo for secure communications
  came from Philip Johnston, the son of a
  missionary to the Navajos and one of the few
  non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently.
• He also knew that Native American
  languagesnotably Choctawhad been used in World
  War I to encode messages.
• Johnston believed Navajo answered the military
  requirement for an undecipherable code because
  Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme
  complexity.
• Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention
  dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone
  without extensive exposure and training.
• It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only
  on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest.

8
The Navajo Code Talker's Dictionary

• When a Navajo code talker received a message,
  what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated
  Navajo words.
• The code talker first had to translate each
  Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he
  used only the first letter of the English
  equivalent in spelling.
• Thus, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant),
  "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all
  stood for the letter "a." One way to say the word
  "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle)
  wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di-glini (victor)
  tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)."

9
The Navajo Code Talkers Dictionarycontinued

• Not all words had to be spelled out letter by
  letter.
• The developers of the original code assigned
  Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently
  used military terms that did not exist in the
  Navajo language.
• Several examples "besh-lo" (iron fish) meant
  "submarine," "dah-he-tih-hi" (hummingbird) meant
  "fighter plane" and "debeh-li-zine" (black
  street) meant "squad."

10
Success in the Pacific

• At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine
  Division signal officer, declared, "Were it not
  for the Navajos, the Marines would never have
  taken Iwo Jima.
• Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around
  the clock during the first two days of the
  battle. Those six sent and received more than 800
  messages, all without error.
• The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant
  General Seizo Arisue, said that while they were
  able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army
  and Army Air Corps, they never cracked the code
  used by the Marines.

11
Department of Defense Honors Navajo Veterans

• Long unrecognized because of the continued value
  of their language as a security classified code,
  the Navajo code talkers of World War II were
  honored for their contributions to defense on
  Sept. 17, 1992, at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
  
• Thirty-five code talkers, all veterans of the
  U.S. Marine Corps, attended the dedication of the
  Navajo code talker exhibit. The exhibit includes
  a display of photographs, equipment and the
  original code, along with an explanation of how
  the code worked.

12
Early Proponents- continued

• Coolidge issued a proclamation on Sept. 28, 1915,
  which declared the second Saturday of each May as
  an American Indian Day and contained the first
  formal appeal for recognition of Indians as
  citizens.
• The year before this proclamation was issued, Red
  Fox James, a Blackfoot Indian, rode horseback
  from state to state seeking approval for a day to
  honor Indians. On December 14, 1915, he presented
  the endorsements of 24 state governments at the
  White House. There is no record, however, of such
  a national day being proclaimed.

13
Prepared by Andrew JonesPurchase College

• All information provided by infoplease.com