Twenty-four years ago France bestowed its highest civilian honor on American Indians who used their ancestral words as shields, forging an unbreakable code to communicate troops movements and enemy positions that the German and Japanese failed to crack.
On Wednesday, top US lawmakers will do the same, presenting the Congressional Gold Medal to some 250 Native American code talkers and their relatives.
“This is long overdue,” Wallace Coffey, chairman of the Comanche Nation, told AFP this week.
With dozens of his compatriots, Coffey traveled to Washington from the central state of Oklahoma to receive the medal on behalf of World War II’s 17 Comanche code talkers, known in their native tongue as “Numurekwa’etuu.”
American Indians from 33 tribes will be honored, most of them posthumously. Edmond Harjo of the Seminole tribe is still alive and will participate in the ceremony.
