The American Mind

Australia’s Sunday Times reports a group of Native American trackers are being sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden:

The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

…

The unit has earned international respect for its tracking skills in the Arizona desert. It was founded in the early 1970s to curb the flow of marijuana into the US from Mexico and has since tracked people-smugglers across hundreds of square kilometres of the Tohono O’odham tribal reservation, southwest of Tucson.

Harold Thompson, a Navajo Indian, and Gary Ortega, from the Tohono reservation, are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional Indian method of finding and following minute clues from a barren landscape. They can detect twigs snapped by passing humans or hair snagged on a branch and tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt.

It’s about time! We’ve had highly-skilled trackers on the government’s payroll for over 30 years and only now are we using them to hunt down America’s #1 enemy.

Here’s a passage from a Smithsonian Magazine article on the Shadow Wolves:

A full-blooded Navajo, Nez belongs to an all-Indian Customs unit, nicknamed the Shadow Wolves, that patrols the reservation.The unit, which numbers 21 agents, was established in 1972 by an act of Congress. (It has recently become part of the Department of Homeland Security.) “The name Shadow Wolves refers to the way we hunt, like a wolf pack,” says Nez, a 14-year veteran who joined the U.S. Customs Patrol Office of Investigation in 1988 after a stint as an officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Navajo Police Department. “If one wolf finds prey, it will call in the rest of the pack.” What makes the Shadow Wolves unique is its modus operandi. Rather than relying solely on high-tech gadgetry— night-vision goggles or motion sensors buried in the ground—members of this unit “cut for sign.” “Sign” is physical evidence—footprints, a dangling thread, a broken twig, a discarded piece of clothing, or tire tracks. “Cutting” is searching for sign or analyzing it once it’s found.

News like this makes it really tough to defend President Bush and his just war.

AJ Strata comments,

I find it surprising the US waited this long to bring them in, but new management brings in new thinking and this is a good sign that people are working to find ways to win this (as opposed to the Dems efforts to find ways to lose this).

Better late than never.

“Native American Trackers to Hunt Bin Laden” [via memeorandum]