WORD WARRIOR
Levi Oakes, 93, the last living Second World War ‘code talker’, served with the U.S. army in the Pacific. Oakes, whose Mohawk language was an unbreakable code for radio transmissions, was honoured on Tuesday in the House of Commons.
Raymond Oakes learned his father, Levi, was a living legend from a radio report.
Levi, 93, is the last surviving Second World War Mohawk code talker, one of a small group of Indigenous veterans who served with the U.S. military, using their tribal languages for secret communications.
But Levi and the other code talkers were sworn to secrecy, a shroud of silence that wasn’t lifted by the U.S. government until 1968 and even then wasn’t widely known for another three decades.
Levi was honoured in Ottawa on Tuesday at a special chiefs assembly of the Assembly of First Nations and was later to be recognized by MPs in the House of Commons.
Raymond Oakes discovered his dad’s wartime service through a news report on an Akwesasne radio station.
“I said, ‘Dad, what’s all this about you being a code talker?’ He said, ‘Can’t say nothing. Top secret,’” Raymond recalled.
“I said, ‘C’mon. I just heard it on CKON!’”
Levi was born in Akwesasne and joined the U.S. army at 18, serving in the Philippines, New Guinea and the South Pacific. There were 17 code talkers from Akwesasne, but Mohawk was just one of 33 tribal languages the code talkers spoke.
In some cases, messages were translated literally into a tribal language, while other messages used tribal words to represent letters, numbers or other designated code words. The Japanese were never able to break the code.
Levi received an honourable discharge in 1946 and later worked as an iron worker in Buffalo and for the New York state highway department.
He was awarded the American Silver Star for courage during the war and in 2016 he and other Mohawk code talkers received the Congressional Silver Medal.
Code talkers may be best known from the 2002 movie Windtalkers that starred Nicholas Cage as a soldier assigned to protect a Navaho code talker. It was only a few years ago that Levi received a letter from the U.S. Department of Defense that officially gave him permission to talk about his wartime duty.
Even freed of the burden of secrecy, Levi seldom talked about the war, his son said. But as kids they’d watch war movies together and hear actor John Wayne’s dialogue: “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”
“Dad would say, ‘He’s full of s---. We’d just hear a twig snap and everyone would open fire,’” Raymond recalled with a laugh.
But Levi’s Mohawk language that the army thought so valuable was less appreciated by his children’s teachers. Raymond attended school in Canada, where students weren’t allowed to speak their own language.
“We went to Catholic schools, and they beat it out of us,” Raymond said. “When we were four or five years old, we spoke Indian. Then we went to school and we could no longer speak it.
“They used our language (during the war), then they took it from us.”