REMEMBERING THE LAST MOHAWK CODE TALKER.
Soldier was honoured by U.S., Canada
OTTAWA • The last surviving Mohawk code talker, one of the men who transmitted messages in their Indigenous languages during the Second World War to baffle enemy code-breakers, has died.
Born in the Quebec part of the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve on Jan. 23, 1925, Louis Levi Oakes registered in the U.S. army at age 18, and served as a code talker in New Guinea and the Philippines until the end of the war. But he kept his work secret for decades afterward, even from his family, only speaking openly about it in recent years after he and other code talkers began to receive national recognition on both sides of the border for their service.
Oakes received a Congressional Silver Medal in 2016. He was recognized at the Assembly of First Nations and in the House of Commons last year, and had a private meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I feel great, happy,” he told community TV station Akwesasne TV in April 2018, speaking about the recent acknowledgment of his contribution. “I was very proud of it.”
Oakes passed away in Snye, Que. on Tuesday of natural causes. He was 94 years old.
Though Oakes was born in Canada, the Akwesasne reserve stretches across parts of Quebec, Ontario and New York, and he was living in Buffalo when he registered to fight for the U.S. army. In an interview with the U.S. Veterans History Project, he said one of his brothers was beaten up and jailed by the RCMP because he hadn’t reported for service in Canada. To avoid a similar fate, Oakes said, he took off across the border.
He said he was initially sent to the army’s induction centre at Fort Niagara, and was then sent to Louisiana to train as a code talker when officers discovered he was Mohawk.
Oakes was one of just 17 Akwesasne Mohawks recognized by the U.S. Congress as code talkers. He was sent to New Guinea and then on to the Philippines, where he transmitted coded messages translated from English to other Mohawk speakers. He often had bodyguards with him, as his language made him a valuable target.
He was in Tokyo for four months after the war ended in 1945, and was honourably discharged the following year.
Oakes went back to Buffalo and worked as a steelworker for the next 30 years, before retiring in Akwesasne. He married at 25 and had 10 children. But for most of his life, he never spoke about his work as a code talker, having sworn an oath of secrecy after he signed up.
His daughter, Dora Oakes, said she didn’t know about her father’s work until just a few years ago, well after the U.S. Congress passed the Code Talkers Recognition Act in 2008 to honour their service. “He never really talked about it,” she said in an interview. “After he got the Congressional medal (in 2016), then he figured it was long enough, you know. Seventy-two years later he could say something about it.”
In total, 33 Indigenous languages were used to transmit messages between U.S. forces during the Second World War, with Navajo by far the most wellknown. But the program wasn’t declassified by the U.S. military until 1968, and even then it garnered little attention for decades. In 2001, President George W. Bush honoured the 29 Navajo code talkers who developed the original code. The following year, the Nicolas Cage film Windtalkers, featuring Navajo code talkers, drew more attention to the contribution of Indigenous language speakers to the war effort.
Dora said her father was pleased with the recognition decades after the fact, but said they both wished it had come sooner, before all the other Mohawk code talkers had passed away. “They should have recognized these guys before, maybe 30, 40 years ago,” she said. “Why wait till he was the last one?”
Code talkers typically employed one of two methods, either translating English messages directly into their own languages, or assigning Indigenous words to each letter of the English alphabet. The Japanese were never able to break the codes.
“It’s a good reminder that these are complex languages that need to be lifted up,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary of Crown-Indigenous Relations. Miller visited Oakes at his home last year, and later organized his official recognition in the House of Commons. Like Oakes, he said, many Indigenous veterans weren’t recognized for their contributions after they came home. “Levi was no exception to that,” he said. “My real hope in all this is that we honour him in death for a longer period than we did in life.”
Though formal acknowledgment came late, Miller said Oakes was a bit of a legend in his own community. While there, he heard a story that Oakes was known for driving very slowly, but “as a matter of recognition, people refused to pass him on the road.”
Unlike her father, Dora doesn’t speak Mohawk, after being forbidden from speaking her language at school as a child. “Every time we try to say something in our language, they would smack our hands or give us the belt,” she said.
But she said the nation is working to revitalize the language, and her own grandchildren now speak more of it than she does. “They’re bringing the language back,” she said. “I’m really grateful for that.”