Erasing History: Project 2025's Vision for Tribal Nations

[Celerity]

March 2025 brought a curious disappearance. The Navajo Code Talkers — military heroes whose Indigenous languages helped secure Allied victory in World War II — vanished from Pentagon websites. Not through executive decree, but via database management: thousands of bytes documenting Native American military valor simply recategorized as “DEI content” and removed.

Peter MacDonald Sr., age 96 and one of just two surviving Code Talkers, found the rationale bewildering. “The Navajo code was a weapon,” he told reporters, “it absolutely has nothing to do with DEI.” After intense backlash from tribal leaders and veterans groups, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell admitted an “aggressive timeline” had led to mistakes: “We want to be very clear, history is not DEI,” he stated, as pages were gradually restored.

The digital purge swept broadly. U.S. Marine Ira Hayes of the Gila River Indian Community — immortalized in the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph — temporarily disappeared from military history. Ty Seidule, retired Army brigadier general and history professor at Hamilton College, underscored the absurdity: “The reason they were chosen was based on their ethnicity. It’s impossible to disentangle their ethnicity from their mission success.” This taxonomic reshuffling applied retroactively to accomplishments predating contemporary diversity initiatives by generations — an Orwellian rewriting of military history.

Thomas Begay, 100, the only other living Code Talker, remained unaware of the controversy. His son Ronald couldn’t bear to tell him: “I didn’t want him to feel hurt by this type of order from a country that he served and used his own language to win the war.”

Systematic Erasure: Beyond Military History......................

snip