Photo credit: the Smithsonian

In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight, for I am the Shadow Wolf.

From the Australian:

An elite group of well-trained Native American marksmen and trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.

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

The Shadow Wolves began as a U.S. Customs unit based in the Arizona Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, just west of Tuscon. Solely Native Americans of Blackfoot, Cheyenne and Pima tribes, they are infamous for their uncanny ability to track people, and have been part of the border campaign to pursue illegal aliens and the drugs they may carry.

“Instead of tracking an animal, we track human beings,” agent Bryan Nez said.

The Shadows Wolves have been mainly tracking drug smugglers along the border to Mexico. But since the Bush Administration doesn’t seem to be all that interested in protecting our borders, they decided to put their talents to use in the WoT, instead.

If I’m understanding this correctly and don’t have two different groups confused with one another, according to the Native American Press/Ojibwe News, the Shadow Wolves are over 30 years old. They started in 1972 to help stop the smuggling of contraband on Indian reservations and they have used those time honored skills to stop illegal drugs like Marijuana (which is most common) from crossing the reservation on its way to other destinations.

Back in 2002, they were teaching their tracking skills to foreign governments to help them hunt down weapons of mass destruction, NAP/ON reported.

“Shadow Wolves use the skills they often learned as children: tracking game on the reservation or finding free-ranging livestock that may have wandered away. These early skills translate to much finer skills later in professional tracking,” NAP/ON reported.

“A group of Shadow Wolves recently traveled to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to train national police, border guards and customs officers on how to detect and track potential weapons of mass destruction smugglers who cross their borders.”

More recently, with the bombing attack on Dick Cheney in Afghanistan, the Pentagon suddenly raised the alarm about the ease in which Taliban and al-Qa’ida fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan.

Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves.

These guys are experts at “cutting sign”, the traditional American Indian way that distinguishes minute clues from a barren landscape. Very small things, like twigs snapped by passing humans or fabric snagged on a branch leave clues of recent passersby. They can tell how long a sliver of food may have lain in the dirt, and if someone has tried to conceal their tracks by strapping pieces of carpet to their boots or shoes.

More on the Shadow Wolves is at the Smithsonian

American Indians are warriors and have a warrior ethos burning in their blood. From the deserts of Arizona to the sandstorms of Iraq and Afghanistan, I think these boys will have little trouble adapting. And they bring a skill set with them which has been modeled by other elite forces, like the Green Berets.

I envision their getting a patch that looks something like this:

Hopefully they’re not being required to cut their hair.

American Indians have the highest per-capita participation in the armed services of any ethnic group, and they have a long time honored tradition of honoring their warriors who come home from battle. They’ve made thankless unique contributions to our wartime efforts, going all the way back to the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII and before. Anyone who has ever been to a Pow Wow has witnessed it during Grand Entry.

Thanks to: Jo’s Cafe