by Tina Grazier
In WWII Native American soldiers called Code Talkers played an important role in winning the war by using the Navajo language to send coded messages. It worked very well since the language was unknown to any of our enemies. Soon Indian trackers in a group called the Shadow Wolves will be using their unique specialized tracking skills to help in the hunt for Osama bin Laden:
WASHINGTON: An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders. The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units. In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.
Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.
US Defence Secretary Robert M.Gates said last month: “If I were Osama bin Laden, I’d keep looking over my shoulder.”