Indigenous WWI veterans get long awaited Medal of Honor review

“I’m so thankful that his blood runs in our veins,” said Tewanna Anderson-Edwards of her great uncle Otis W. Leader, a World War I Choctaw code talker.

Leader, a corporal in the Army’s 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, once destroyed a machine gun nest singlehandedly after some of his men had been killed, capturing two machine guns and defeating 18 enemy soldiers in the process.

He would go on to receive the Purple Heart, the Silver Star Medal, the Victory Medal and French Croix de Guerre with Palm, among other awards.

General John J. Pershing even once referred to Leader as one of the “war’s greatest fighting machines,” according to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

But despite those accolades, Leader and other WWI code talkers — service members who used Indigenous languages to create undecipherable communications — still haven’t received the recognition they deserve, Edwards believes.

“There’s just no telling how many lives they saved,” Edwards told Military Times.

A move to rectify that, however, may be on the horizon.

Leader is one of a group of Indigenous veterans who are currently being reviewed as potential recipients of the Medal of Honor — more than a century after they served. In all, roughly 12,000 Native Americans served during World War I.

“It’s my ultimate goal to see that he gets his due recognition. … He so deserved it,” Edwards said. “He wasn’t just a code talker, he was a war hero.”

Leader’s eligibility for the Medal of Honor comes as part of the World War I Valor Medals Review Act, which was passed as part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.

The law allows for a review of actions by non-white veterans who served in World War I to determine whether select acts of valor, which were during that period often diminished due to one’s skin color, warrant the nation’s highest military honor.

To qualify, veterans from various racial backgrounds must have been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross, French Croix de Guerre with Palm or have been recommended for a Medal of Honor.

Once such a service record is brought to the attention of the Army or Navy, the associated branch reviews the record and issues a determination regarding award status.

As part of that process, the Pentagon was advised to collaborate with the Valor Medals Review Task Force, a joint operation run by the World War I Centennial Commission and Park University’s George S. Robb Centre for the Study of the Great War.

Dr. Timothy Westcott, the Missouri-based department’s director, told Military Times he first became interested in the subject after he saw a university presentation during Black History Month about Sgt. William A. Butler, a Black war hero who was nominated for, but never received, the Medal of Honor.

In September 1918, George S. Robb — the department’s namesake — was recommended for a Medal of Honor on the same piece of paper as Butler. While Robb would go on to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, Butler would be presented a Distinguished Service Cross.

From there, Westcott got involved with the Centennial Commission, which oversaw the Valor Medals Review Project and Task Force and researched veteran service records to make retroactive award recommendations to the Pentagon and Congress.

When the commission disbanded in 2024 after completing the National World War I Memorial in Washington, the Robb Centre took charge of that effort.

So far, Westcott and the department have identified 214 service members from World War I who met the criteria for Medal of Honor eligibility. Of those, 24 are Indigenous veterans.

“We have submitted 56 [total] nomination packets,” he said, noting that the process is particularly grueling. “It takes us about six to nine months to write a nomination packet, and those are approximately 150 to 165 pages in length each.”

Of the 56 packets Westcott’s team has submitted, 49 have been sent to the Army. The other seven have gone to the Navy.

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There’s currently no timeline for approval. Once Westcott and his team submit the packet, there’s limited contact between the center and the service, he said. Since the department submitted its first packet in 2022, the Army has provided just one follow-up communication.

Before it disbanded, the Centennial Commission worked with the Sequoyah National Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to build a database of all Indigenous personnel who served in World War I.

Erin Fehr, the assistant director and archivist for Sequoyah who helped construct the database, told Military Times that the idea for it came after she put up a 2017 exhibit on the WWI code talkers.

“Most people associate code talkers with World War II, when in reality they began in the first World War,” she said.

But as Fehr was getting the exhibit together, a lack of public awareness of Indigenous military service during the First World War became apparent.

“[Visitors] didn’t even realize that Native people were involved in the war at all,” said Fehr, who is Yup’ik.

So, Fehr embarked on a journey to find as many names of Native American service members from World War I as possible to establish a wall of honor, listing veterans by tribal affiliation. In three months, she and the center had discovered 2,300 names that they taped to a wall in the exhibit for visitors to see.

But there was much more work to do.

“We haven’t found those 12,000 names,” she said.

Since then, Fehr and Sequoyah have been relentless in compiling a comprehensive list, with the team currently tracking around 6,200 names.

Westcott approached Fehr some time in late 2018 or early 2019, Fehr said, and asked for the center’s assistance in finding Indigenous service members who may be eligible for the Medal of Honor under the World War I Valor Medals Review Act.

Fehr jumped at the opportunity to collaborate.

“The whole purpose behind this project was not to keep the information for ourselves,” she said.

Fehr said a good portion of her research and findings have come from periodicals released by the American Indian boarding school system, since many service members had been sent to such places during their youth.

American Indian boarding schools were erected in the late 19th century and devised as a way to eradicate the traditions and languages of Indigenous peoples — oftentimes through verbal, physical and sexual abuse — while forcing assimilation. There were more than 523 such schools operating at one time, according to The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” said R.H. Pratt, the founder and superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally run Indigenous boarding school.

A recent Washington Post investigation found that more than 3,100 students died at American Indian boarding schools, more than three times the amount the U.S. government previously reported.

Fehr pointed out the grim paradox at play for Native Americans who attended boarding schools and then joined the ranks: All their lives, they’d been chastised for speaking their language. In many cases, it was beaten out of them. But when they enlisted to serve the country that had wronged them, it was their language they were told was key to defeating the enemy.

Fehr also explained that the military was unsure how to handle Native American enlistees leading up to World War I because of boarding schools. Considering the goal of the schools was to achieve assimilation into white culture, keeping Indigenous troops separate would signal that the federally funded schools had failed.

The U.S. ultimately decided to integrate the ranks.

Among those men was Leader, of whom Edwards says she now has only vague memories — namely, his palpable warmth and beautiful smile.

“He was like a big Santa Claus to me,” she said.

Because of Leader’s demeanor, no one would ever guess the tragedies and adversity he faced in the war, she added.

But his story is one Edwards hopes will soon be recognized with the highest military honor. And it’s one of many in the Indigenous community she hopes will be widely shared.

“We’re just now beginning to find a balance,” she said, “between never forgetting and moving forward with all this.”