Forgotten Warriors: American Indian Service Men in Vietnam

Statistics on the population of Native Americans who served in the Vietnam War

Review of \u3ci\u3eWorld War II and the American Indian\u3c/i\u3e by Kenneth William Townsend

Although the publisher claims on its jacket cover that Kenneth William Townsend\u27s World War II and the American Indian offers the first history of the twenty-five thousand Native Americans who served during World War II, it is actually the third general history of Native American participation in the war effort. Alison R. Bernstein\u27s American Indians and World War II (1991) and Jere Bishop Franco\u27s Crossing the Pond: The Native American Effort in World War II (1999) precede it, as have several smaller scale or more focused studies. Numerous biographies dealing with Native American veterans of the war, studies of the particular roles Native Americans played in Gombat, such as the Comanche Code Talkers, as well as tribal histories of the period are also in the works and should appear in print in the near future. Given the current interest in the Greatest Generation, it appears that literature on the subject will expand considerably. Townsend\u27s study is meticulously researched and well balanced. He covers federal Indian policy up to the beginning of the war and offers a good analysis of the watershed policies of John Collier as the principal architect of the Indian New Deal. But the heart of Townsend\u27s history is contained in two important points. He argues that America, and especially John Collier, needed Indians to counter the charges that the United States was really a racist society only slightly less oppressive than Germany or Japan. After all, American society was segregated and racial minorities were living at the lowest economic levels. Collier worked hard indeed to obtain full Native American participation in the war effort in order to demonstrate that American Indians were not only ready to take up arms and stand shoulder to shoulder with white men in integrated military units, but also that, as a result of the Indian New Deal, Indians were fast becoming legitimate American citizens. In his attempt to repair the damages done by the nineteenth-century assimilation and allotment policies, Collier had opened himself up to charges that he was essentially segregating Indians by allowing the tribes to reorganize their own governments and maintain their reservations. Full military participation would dispel the idea of possible Native American disloyalty and confirm that the Indian New Deal was in fact a workable solution to the Indian Problem. Because there was, as Townsend correctly points out, resistance to entering the military service on the part of some Native Americans, Collier made uncharacteristic efforts to compel draft resistors to abide by United States statutes. In part, Collier\u27s willingness to compel Native Americans to participate in the war effort was to prove that Indian people had not been receptive to Nazi propaganda. Townsend supports the notion that Collier was correct in his assessment of Native American draft resistance, which appeared in relatively isolated places where America and its war effort were irrelevant or among groups asserting their own sovereignty. Nazi propaganda did not make many inroads into tribal societies. On the contrary, Native Americans volunteered or submitted to the draft, as Townsend points out and as Collier never tired of informing the American public, in numbers exceeding their proportion of the population. But why did Native Americans seemingly devote themselves and their tribal resources to the war effort? Several scholars have reduced Native American participation in the armed forces to either the attempt to legitimize themselves as American citizens, the lack of economic opportunity on the reservations for young men, the status given to soldiers in some Native American communities, or to the simple fact that Native Americans, as a result of Collier\u27s insistence on full participation, were heavily recruited. Townsend correctly views the Native American acceptance of American military service as multifaceted and complex. Native Americans entered the service and fought in the great battles of World War II for a wide variety of reasons. That they did so certainly aided the overall war effort and contributed to the victory over the Axis in more ways than one. Townsend\u27s book is a worthy effort and a definite contribution to the growing literature on the Greatest Generation

Review of \u3ci\u3eKilling the White Man\u27s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century\u3c/i\u3e By Fergus M. Bordewich

Fergus M. Bordewich\u27s foray into Native American politics and identity is disturbing on a number of different levels. It is, on the one hand, a remarkably accurate look at Native American political dilemmas, frustrations, and achievements. On the other, it is a flawed survey of what it means to be Native American in the United States. It lacks a clear critical framework and races willy-nilly from one group to another, judging achievements on the basis of economic success or how the tribes fit into the hierarchical apparatus that runs the nation. Bordewich is at his finest when dealing with the American obsession with race. He writes elegantly about race, the invention of the Indian as the anathema of western culture, and how European invaders and Americans used imagery to justify genocide. Race was, and is, simply a social construction used to deny human rights. The color of one\u27s skin and the texture of one\u27s hair are simply false and useless indicators of intelligence, cultural worth, or political reliability. Unfortunately Bordewich fails to convince after he gets to his main theme. The book is essentially an argument for dropping any special rights that Indians have managed to hang on to over the last five centuries. Bordewich writes that Indians are no longer Indians anymore and should, therefore, be treated as other Americans. In a revival of the modernization theory of colonialism, Bordewich argues that: (1) Indians are out-marrying at rates which will eventually destroy any kind of racial or tribal identity; (2) many Indian groups are neither racially nor culturally homogenous; (3) most Indians have more or less adopted the general economic views, political attitudes, and social constructions of the American majority; (4) Indian tribal governments, with few exceptions, are corrupt, do not have the democratic safeguards of institutional checks and balances, and have not provided sufficiently for the basic civil rights of tribal members that are enjoyed by other Americans; (5) Indians are frightening other Americans by dredging up certain dubious rights, such as tribal sovereignty, to deny these Americans, mostly whites, their rights of property and political representation; (6) Indian traditionalists are not really environmentalists as they are often portrayed, but the dupes of the tree-hugging, no-growth radicals standing in the path of scientific knowledge and progress; and (7) most Indians, just like other Americans, are immigrants and conquerors themselves. Given all of these factors, he contends, Indian assimilation has been accomplished and the attempt to maintain separate governments and tribal sovereignty is an exercise in futility. In short, modernization is an absolute fact, as immutable, to Bordewich, as the rhythm of the ocean tides

Review of \u3ci\u3eKilling the White Man\u27s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century\u3c/i\u3e By Fergus M. Bordewich

Fergus M. Bordewich\u27s foray into Native American politics and identity is disturbing on a number of different levels. It is, on the one hand, a remarkably accurate look at Native American political dilemmas, frustrations, and achievements. On the other, it is a flawed survey of what it means to be Native American in the United States. It lacks a clear critical framework and races willy-nilly from one group to another, judging achievements on the basis of economic success or how the tribes fit into the hierarchical apparatus that runs the nation. Bordewich is at his finest when dealing with the American obsession with race. He writes elegantly about race, the invention of the Indian as the anathema of western culture, and how European invaders and Americans used imagery to justify genocide. Race was, and is, simply a social construction used to deny human rights. The color of one\u27s skin and the texture of one\u27s hair are simply false and useless indicators of intelligence, cultural worth, or political reliability. Unfortunately Bordewich fails to convince after he gets to his main theme. The book is essentially an argument for dropping any special rights that Indians have managed to hang on to over the last five centuries. Bordewich writes that Indians are no longer Indians anymore and should, therefore, be treated as other Americans. In a revival of the modernization theory of colonialism, Bordewich argues that: (1) Indians are out-marrying at rates which will eventually destroy any kind of racial or tribal identity; (2) many Indian groups are neither racially nor culturally homogenous; (3) most Indians have more or less adopted the general economic views, political attitudes, and social constructions of the American majority; (4) Indian tribal governments, with few exceptions, are corrupt, do not have the democratic safeguards of institutional checks and balances, and have not provided sufficiently for the basic civil rights of tribal members that are enjoyed by other Americans; (5) Indians are frightening other Americans by dredging up certain dubious rights, such as tribal sovereignty, to deny these Americans, mostly whites, their rights of property and political representation; (6) Indian traditionalists are not really environmentalists as they are often portrayed, but the dupes of the tree-hugging, no-growth radicals standing in the path of scientific knowledge and progress; and (7) most Indians, just like other Americans, are immigrants and conquerors themselves. Given all of these factors, he contends, Indian assimilation has been accomplished and the attempt to maintain separate governments and tribal sovereignty is an exercise in futility. In short, modernization is an absolute fact, as immutable, to Bordewich, as the rhythm of the ocean tides

Student-led sustainability transformations: employing realist evaluation to open the black box of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum

Purpose – While sustainability-oriented education is increasingly placing importance on engaging students in inter- and transdisciplinary learning processes with societal actors and authentic challenges in the centre, little research attends to how and what students learn in such educational initiatives. This paper aims to address this by opening the ‘black box’ of learning in a Challenge Lab curriculum with transformational sustainability ambitions.Design/methodology/approach – Realist evaluation was employed as an analytical frame that takes social context into account to unpack learning mechanisms and associated learning outcomes. A socio-cultural perspective on learning was adopted, and ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations, were used.Findings – Three context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations were identified, capturing what students placed value and emphasis on when developing capabilities for leading sustainability transformations:\ua0 (1) engaging with complex ‘in-between’ sustainability challenges in society with stakeholders across sectors and perspectives; (2) navigating purposeful and transformative change via backcasting; and (3) ‘whole-person’ learning from the inside-out as an identity-shaping process, guided by personal values.Originality – This paper delineates and discusses important learning mechanisms and outcomes when students act as co-creators of knowledge in a sustainability-oriented educational initiative, working with authentic challenges together with societal actors.Practical implications – The findings of this paper can inform the design, development, evaluation, and comparison of similar educational initiatives across institutions, while leaving room for contextual negotiation and adjustment

Superembeddings, Non-Linear Supersymmetry and 5-branes

We examine general properties of superembeddings, i.e., embeddings of supermanifolds into supermanifolds. The connection between an embedding procedure and the method of non-linearly realised supersymmetry is clarified, and we demonstrate how the latter arises as a special case of the former. As an illustration, the super-5-brane in 7 dimensions, containing a self-dual 3-form world-volume field strength, is formulated in both languages, and provides an example of a model where the embedding condition does not suffice to put the theory on-shell.Comment: plain tex, 28 p

Learning to Frame Complex Sustainability Challenges in Place: Explorations Into a Transdisciplinary “Challenge Lab” Curriculum

Complex sustainability challenges may never be fully solved, rather requiring continuous, adaptive, and reflexive responses over time. Engagement of this nature departs from well-structured problems that entail expected solutions; here, focus shifts toward ill-structured or ill-defined issues characterized by wickedness. In the context of complex challenges, inadequate or absent framing has performative implications on action. By overlooking the value of framing, eventual responses may not only fall short; they may even displace, prolong, or exacerbate situations by further entrenching unsustainability. In educational settings, we know little about how curriculum designs support challenge framing, and how students experience and learn framing processes. In this paper we explore a transdisciplinary “Challenge Lab” (C-Lab) curriculum from a perspective of challenge framing. When considering framing in higher education, we turn to the agenda in education for, as and with sustainable development to be problem-solving, solutions-seeking or challenge-driven. We introduce framing as a boundary object for transformative praxis, where sustainability is held to be complex and contextual. This study is qualitative and case-based, designed to illuminate processes of and experiences into sustainability challenge framing in a transdisciplinary learning setting. Methodologically, we draw from student reflective diaries that span the duration of a curriculum design. We structure our results with the support of three consecutive lenses for understanding “curriculum”: intended, enacted, and experienced curriculum. First, we present and describe a C-Lab approach at the level of ambition and design. Here it is positioned as a student-centered space, process, and institutional configuration, working with framing and re-framing complex sustainability challenges in context. Second, we present a particular C-Lab curriculum design that unfolded in 2020. Third, we illustrate the lived experiences and practical realities of participating in C-Lab as students and as teachers. We reflect upon dilemmas that accompany challenge framing in C-Lab and discuss the methodological implications of this study. Finally, we point toward fruitful research avenues that may extend understandings of challenge framing in higher education

SNPexp - A web tool for calculating and visualizing correlation between HapMap genotypes and gene expression levels

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Expression levels for 47294 transcripts in lymphoblastoid cell lines from all 270 HapMap phase II individuals, and genotypes (both HapMap phase II and III) of 3.96 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the same individuals are publicly available. We aimed to generate a user-friendly web based tool for visualization of the correlation between SNP genotypes within a specified genomic region and a gene of interest, which is also well-known as an expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>SNPexp is implemented as a server-side script, and publicly available on this website: <url>http://tinyurl.com/snpexp</url>. Correlation between genotype and transcript expression levels are calculated by performing linear regression and the Wald test as implemented in PLINK and visualized using the UCSC Genome Browser. Validation of SNPexp using previously published eQTLs yielded comparable results.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>SNPexp provides a convenient and platform-independent way to calculate and visualize the correlation between HapMap genotypes within a specified genetic region anywhere in the genome and gene expression levels. This allows for investigation of both cis and trans effects. The web interface and utilization of publicly available and widely used software resources makes it an attractive supplement to more advanced bioinformatic tools. For the advanced user the program can be used on a local computer on custom datasets.</p

KYPO4INDUSTRY: A Testbed for Teaching Cybersecurity of Industrial Control Systems

There are different requirements on cybersecurity of industrial control systems and information technology systems. This fact exacerbates the global issue of hiring cybersecurity employees with relevant skills. In this paper, we present KYPO4INDUSTRY training facility and a course syllabus for beginner and intermediate computer science students to learn cybersecurity in a simulated industrial environment. The training facility is built using open-source hardware and software and provides reconfigurable modules of industrial control systems. The course uses a flipped classroom format with hands-on projects: the students create educational games that replicate real cyber attacks. Throughout the semester, they learn to understand the risks and gain capabilities to respond to cyber attacks that target industrial control systems. Our described experience from the design of the testbed and its usage can help any educator interested in teaching cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems