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The American Indian as Sniper (The Stars and Stripes, 1919)You will see that during the First World War it was not beyond the editors of THE STARS and STRIPES to indulge in ethnic stereotyping from time to time and, to be sure, they exploited that privilege in the attached article ("Yank Indian was Heap Big Help in Winning the War") yet regardless of this fact, the performance of the American Indian soldiers on the Western Front got high marks for a number of valued military skills from many of the French and British officers who came in contact with them. It was not simply their ability to shoot well that inspired the praise, but their nocturnal instincts while patrolling in the darkness of No-Man's-Land as well as a unique sense of bravery.
The article is rich with a number of factoids that the Western Front reader will no doubt enjoy; among them, mention is made of German women serving in combat. Are the Indians of Jewish Origin? (The Literary Digest, 1912)
The earliest encounters with the Native American had left the brain trust of Europe entirely baffled. The persistent matter as to "who" these people were remained an unanswered question well into the Nineteenth Century, for in order to qualify as a member of "enlightened" classes, a fellow had to show some sufficiency in at least two fields: classical literature and the Bible. Therefore, it stood to their reasoning that the inhabitants of the Americas had their story told in one of those two fields of study. Some of Europe's elite were convinced that these people were descendants of the survivors of Troy, who, fearing the Greeks, caught a strong wind which allowed them to sail both the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic and arrive on that far distant shore. Others tended to believe that the Native American could only have descended from the lost tribes of Israel, which is the topic of this one page article. The Trail of Tears (The North American Review, 1912)Twenty five years after the long march that has come to be known as the 'Trail of Tears', an account of that sad injustice was written by one of the first archeologists of the American south-west, O.K. Davis. "The troops and Indians marched side by side for two days for Fort Bowie. Then, Geronimo, Natchez, and about twenty men...escaped..." The second half of the article is available upon request. Sioux Code-Talkers of the Great War (The Stars and Stripes, 1919)The Navajo code-talkers in the Second World War are well-known, but not so terribly well known were their brothers the Sioux, and the similar contributions that they had made just twenty years earlier in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Heroism on the Western Front (The Stars and Stripes, 1918)"It was the Prussian Guard against the American Indian on the morning of October 8 in the hills of Champagne". 'Failure of Indians as Soldiers' (The Literary Digest, 1897)"The last of the companies of Indians enlisted in the regular army of the United States has been mustered out after six years trial, at Omaha, Nebraska. The Omaha WORLD-HERALD intimates that the failure of the experiment may not be entirely due to the Indians."
The journalist reporting on this matter opined that all subjugated people should never be expected to fight for a tyrannical government.
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