Who else thinks you shouldn’t be able to vote if you’re on any kind of welfare? Doesn’t that seem like a conflict of interest?

Most people only know about the Navajo Code Talkers, but the story actually starts much earlier—and involves a lot more tribes than most people realize. In the final months of World War I, the U.S. Army in France was getting hammered by German interception of their communications. Runners were being captured or killed, phone lines tapped, codes broken. Then some officers overheard a handful of Choctaw soldiers from Oklahoma talking among themselves in their own language. That gave them an idea. In October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, a group of Choctaw men from the 36th Division became the first official code talkers. They started sending battlefield messages over the field telephones in Choctaw. The Germans couldn’t make sense of it. Other tribes were pulled in around the same time—Cherokee, Cheyenne, Comanche, Osage, Yankton Sioux, and even some Ho-Chunk. It was mostly Type 2 code talking (just speaking the language straight), though the Choctaws developed a few coded terms too. It worked so well that the idea stuck. When World War II came around, the military remembered. This time they got more organized about it. The Army started recruiting early. In late 1940 they brought in 17 Comanche men who developed a formal coded vocabulary of around 250 terms—tanks became “turtles,” machine guns became “sewing machine guns,” and Hitler got the name “Crazy White Man.” Thirteen of those Comanches landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the 4th Infantry Division and fought all the way across Europe. The code was never broken. Around the same time, the Army also used Meskwaki (Sac and Fox), Chippewa and Oneida speakers, Hopi, and others in smaller groups. Then came the Marines and the Navajo. In 1942, Philip Johnston (who’d grown up around the Navajo) convinced the Corps that the language could work. They brought in the first 29 Navajo recruits—the “Original 29”—who built a sophisticated code with hundreds of terms (eventually over 600). Fighter planes were hummingbirds, bombers were buzzards, submarines were iron fish. By the end of the war, somewhere around 400 Navajo had been trained as code talkers, and they served in every major Marine campaign in the Pacific. At Iwo Jima, one Marine officer famously said the island wouldn’t have been taken without them. Other tribes whose languages were used in WWII include Kiowa, Creek (Muscogee), Seminole, Pawnee, Crow, Assiniboine, Lakota and Dakota Sioux, Menominee, and more. In total, more than 30 Native nations contributed code talkers across both wars. After World War II the need faded fast. Modern encryption technology made spoken language codes less necessary. A few Navajo code talkers did some training exercises after the war, and some individuals served in Korea and Vietnam, but the formal programs effectively ended by the early 1950s. The irony isn’t lost on anyone: these men were asked to use the very languages that boarding schools had tried to beat out of them—and those same languages helped win two world wars. The codes were never broken. Pretty remarkable chapter of American history that still doesn’t get talked about enough outside the Navajo story.

Now that fall has arrived, I thought I’d share something I wrote about how and why what we now call the first “Thanksgiving” came about. The “first Thanksgiving” was not a national holiday, not a church service, and not a cozy turkey dinner between two equal families. It was a three day harvest gathering at Plymouth in the fall of 1621. The only firsthand account is a short passage by Edward Winslow. He never called it Thanksgiving. Who the English were. About 100 people sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. Some were Separatists who had lived in Leiden. Others were hired settlers and servants. They meant to land near the Hudson. Storms put them on Cape Cod in November 1620, then at an empty village the Wampanoag (WAHM-puh-nog) called Patuxet (puh-TUK-sit). They renamed it Plymouth. They arrived too late to plant. How they were holding up. The first winter wrecked them. Roughly half died, mostly in January and February 1621, from scurvy, pneumonia, and exposure. Bradford wrote that two or three sometimes died in a day. At the worst point only six or seven people were well enough to nurse the rest. Only four married women survived. By harvest time about 53 English were left. Who the Native people were. This was not one nameless tribe. It was Wampanoag country. Wampanoag means People of the First Light, a confederation of related villages across what is now southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. They had lived there for thousands of years. The English sources usually name only a few of them, and even those names get mixed up. The man later generations call Massasoit (MASS-uh-soyt) was not named Massasoit. That word was a title, like “chief.” His name was Ousamequin (oo-SAH-muh-kwin). He was sachem (SAY-chum), meaning political and military leader, of the Pokanoket (poh-kuh-NO-kit). The Pokanoket were the leading Wampanoag band that made the alliance with Plymouth. Their main seat was inland at Mount Hope, in what is now Rhode Island. Tisquantum (tiss-KWON-tum), the man most people know as Squanto, was from Patuxet. Patuxet was the Wampanoag village that stood on the exact ground the English later called Plymouth. By 1620 that village was empty. Hobbamock (HOB-uh-mock) was another Wampanoag man sent to live near the English and deal with them. Samoset (SAM-uh-set) was not Wampanoag. He was an Abenaki (ab-uh-NAH-kee) leader from the Maine coast. He happened to be visiting Ousamequin when he walked into Plymouth and spoke the first English greeting. The land was not empty by accident. From about 1616 to 1619 an epidemic, likely brought by earlier European fishermen and traders, tore through coastal New England. Many Wampanoag villages lost most of their people. Patuxet was abandoned. Bones still lay above ground when the English arrived. The surviving Wampanoag were weaker than their rivals to the west, the Narragansett (nair-uh-GAN-set), who had been extracting tribute after the die off. The Narragansett were not at the 1621 feast. They were the political problem behind it. First contact was not a handshake on a beach. Europeans had been fishing, trading, and kidnapping along this coast for decades. In 1614 Captain Thomas Hunt seized about 20 Patuxet men, including Tisquantum, and several Nauset (NAW-set) men, and sold them. The Nauset were a Wampanoag related people on Cape Cod. Tisquantum reached England, then returned in 1619 to find Patuxet gone. That history sat under every later meeting. The Mayflower party’s first acts on Cape Cod were not diplomatic. Exploring parties dug up buried seed corn and opened graves in Nauset territory. On December 8, 1620, at what is now First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Nauset men attacked the shore party at dawn. Arrows and musket fire were exchanged. No one was recorded killed. The English named the spot and moved on. The Nauset had reason. Stores had been taken. Graves had been disturbed. All winter the two sides watched each other. The English saw figures at a distance and feared an attack they were too weak to survive. The Wampanoag watched a sick, armed group occupy dead Patuxet and decide whether these newcomers were useful, dangerous, or both. Formal talk did not start until spring. March 16, 1621: Samoset walked into Plymouth and greeted them in English. “Welcome, Englishmen.” He had learned the language from fishermen in Maine. He spent the night, came back with others, and then brought Tisquantum, who spoke better English. Tisquantum showed them how to plant maize with fish as fertilizer and where to take herring. That help was real. So was his own agenda. He was a Patuxet survivor with no village left, useful to both sides and trusted by neither for long. March 22, 1621: Ousamequin arrived with about 60 Pokanoket men. Both sides exchanged hostages before the leaders met. They agreed to a mutual defense pact. No one would harm the other. Offenders would be turned over. Stolen tools would be returned. Each would aid the other if attacked. Visitors would leave weapons behind. King James would regard Ousamequin as a friend and ally. It was politics, not friendship poetry. Why Ousamequin signed. He needed guns and a counterweight against the Narragansett. Why the English signed. They were few, hungry, and isolated. Both sides were wary. The English often read Native caution as a threat. The Wampanoag already knew Englishmen could kidnap and cheat. Respect here meant useful caution, not affection. The fall gathering. After a decent maize harvest Bradford sent four men fowling. They killed enough birds for nearly a week. The English also fired their muskets for sport. That noise brought Ousamequin and about 90 Wampanoag men, mostly Pokanoket warriors. They may have thought the place was under attack. They may already have been on post harvest diplomatic rounds. Winslow does not say they were invited in advance. They stayed three days. The Wampanoag brought five deer. The English had fowl, fish, eels, shellfish, and maize. No potatoes. No pies. No long table of smiling families. About 53 English, including many children. About 90 Wampanoag men. They ate outdoors, ran races, and showed weapons. It was a harvest feast plus a treaty inspection. The Wampanoag outnumbered the colony. Nearby but not central to the meal: that same September 1621, Plymouth sent a trading party to the Massachusett (mass-uh-CHOO-sit) people around Boston Harbor, with Tisquantum as guide. They were another related nation, not the guests at the three day feast. Common errors. They colonists were not “Pilgrims” in their own speech. That label came later. They did not land on Plymouth Rock as a ceremony. Tisquantum did not single handedly save them out of simple kindness. The Native people were not a generic backdrop. They were Wampanoag, specifically Pokanoket diplomats on emptied Patuxet land, after a first clash with the Nauset, under pressure from the Narragansett. The meal was not the first thanksgiving on this continent. Native nations already held harvest feasts. Plymouth’s first recorded religious day of thanksgiving came in 1623 after a drought broke. What followed. The 1621 peace lasted more than 50 years, which is longer than most people think. It did not last forever. English numbers grew. Land pressure grew. Missionary pressure grew. In 1675 Ousamequin’s son Metacom (MET-uh-kom), called King Philip by the English, went to war. That war was savage on all sides and ended Wampanoag independence in the region. The 1621 meal does not erase that. It also does not become a cartoon of doomed innocence. The clean version. Two battered groups made a temporary bargain. The English needed food and safety. The Pokanoket Wampanoag needed allies and weapons after a demographic collapse. They ate together for three days on Patuxet ground. Then history kept moving. That is the record. The rest is later paint. The image with this post is Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s oil painting The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914, now at Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is the picture most Americans were taught. It is also a Colonial Revival romance. What she got wrong: a long formal table and chairs the colony barely had; a log cabin Plymouth never built; Wampanoag men in Plains style eagle feather headdresses they did not wear; Native guests off to the side while an English elder leads a churchlike prayer; roughly even numbers, when about 90 Wampanoag men outnumbered about 53 English, many of them children.