The Sooner Squadron's Six Native American Women: Coast Guard SPARS in World War II

In 1943 six Native American women, from different tribes, volunteered for the SPARS, the women's branch of the U.S. Coast Guard. They took service jobs on the home front, which freed men to go overseas. Recruited in Oklahoma as part of the "Sooner Squadron," they went on to serve in Florida, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Hawaii — one of many examples of what Native Americans gave to World War II.

The call

Congress authorized the SPARS — a single member was a "Spar" — in November 1942, together with the Navy's women's branch, the WAVES. It took women from across the country, even those with no experience of the sea; in all, 13,000 women joined the Coast Guard in non-combat roles. Rather than one national campaign, the Coast Guard recruited state by state.

In Oklahoma, Mabel Martin oversaw the recruiting of at least 100 new Spars. She appealed to women's patriotism and the needs of the war — and, more tempting still, promised that friends could stay together through basic training as one Oklahoma cohort, the Sooner Squadron. In May 1943 she told a Chickasha newspaper that groups of friends could sign up together, share the experience, and take pride in belonging to another Sooner outfit.

Native women took her up on it. The Otoe cousins Womack and Goslin joined together; so did two Choctaw friends and fellow teachers, O'Bannon and Everidge.

Native Americans in the war

An estimated 65,000 Native Americans took part in the U.S. armed forces and military industries during World War II. No one knows the exact number, because military records had no racial category for Native Americans. Most women worked in factories, but historians believe about 800 served in the armed forces, where women from different tribal nations were placed in white units. The SPARS discriminated against African Americans until 1945; the six Native women were able to enlist in 1943.

Recruiters often reached young Native men and women through Indian boarding schools. The Indian Leader, the paper of Haskell in Kansas, wrote in 1943 that Native women meant to keep pace with the men who had gone to war, and took pride in two former students who joined the SPARS — Goslin and Locust. Many Native soldiers said the boarding schools had left them at ease with military discipline, which was often less harsh than how the schools had treated them.

Why they joined

The reasons were many and complicated.

• Family. Goslin enlisted partly because her 17-year-old brother was too ill to join the Army. Gentry's husband was already stationed abroad when she joined in 1943. Locust's brother served in the Army, and her grandfather had served in a Union Army regiment nicknamed the "Indian Home Guard Volunteers."
• Patriotism, taught at home or at school.
• Money and careers. All six were college-educated, and most had worked as secretaries or teachers. O'Bannon and Everidge had studied and then taught at Goodland Indian School, and a mentor urged them to join. Goslin and Locust each thought the SPARS offered women better opportunities than the other branches.

Training and service

Most of the Sooner Squadron, the six included, trained at the SPARS' Biltmore Hotel facility in Palm Beach, Florida — now on the National Register of Historic Places — and their training was like any other Spar's, sharpening old skills and adding new ones. O'Bannon and Everidge told the Tulsa World they found it both valuable and enjoyable.

Afterwards they did the same jobs as Spars everywhere, leaning on their secretarial training to help Coast Guard members and their families.

O'Bannon impressed her superior, Captain Eugene A. Coffin, who recommended her for officer training. She and Everidge became the first Native American women to attend the Coast Guard Academy. In 1945 Coffin chose O'Bannon to go with him to Honolulu, and she was there when the war ended — she later remembered the whole city dancing in the streets.

Stereotypes

The military did not mark them as different on their enlistment forms, but the press made their background the story, with offensive phrases like "Indian Girl," "blanketed forebearers" and "on the warpath." "Cherokee princess" was repeated again and again about Locust — including in a story about her blind date with Johnny Cannon, a Kiowa Navy reservist she had known at boarding school, reprinted in more than six Florida papers.

They pushed back in different ways.

• Some brushed it aside, stressing that their backgrounds were as American and their motives as patriotic as anyone's.
• Locust went further. She used the coverage to remind readers that her Cherokee ancestors were here long before the Mayflower, and that most Cherokee lived in Oklahoma because ancestors like her great-grandfather had been forced along the Trail of Tears.
• They celebrated their tribal traditions, presenting them in a positive light for newspaper readers.

They did not always feel united. In one interview Goslin set herself and Womack apart, saying the two of them were full-blooded and the others were not. Blood quantum — the percentage of Native ancestry a person has — is a method of deciding tribal membership, and controversial among many Native Americans today.

A Tulsa World article by Sarah G. Morris (August 29, 1943) opened with a joke: four of the Oklahoma Spars, she wrote, would happily see Oklahoma handed back to the Indians — so long as it went to them. The joke rests on how the United States was formed, especially in places like Oklahoma, through land wars and treaties with Native nations. Later Morris assured readers the women were proud of their government and wanted to preserve it and its freedoms, and Goslin told her her only regret was that there were not more Native Americans there. Despite boarding schools and other institutions built to assimilate them, the women saw themselves as both Americans and members of their tribes.

After the war

Womack and Goslin worked hard to honor Native service in the war. Goslin's mother founded the Otoe War Mothers, the first all-Native chapter of the American War Mothers, and both women belonged to it; War Mothers support serving members and veterans with care packages, meals and bedside visits. Goslin's father honored her service in the Otoe language with a veteran's flag song. Otoe-Missouria flag songs had been revived in World War I, both to keep the language alive and to honor the tribe's service.

Those who came after

The Coast Guard readmitted women in the 1970s. In 1991 Mara Huling became the first woman of Native ancestry to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy — her father is part Cherokee and her mother Japanese American — and she was also the Coast Guard's first female Asian American aviator. Native American women have since served as Coast Guard pilots and officers.

Sources

Based on "Native SPARS of the Sooner Squadron," National Park Service, written by Alison Russell, a consulting historian with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, under the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the Park Service. It draws on G. M. Gouveia, "'We Also Serve': American Indian Women's Role in World War II," Michigan Historical Review 20, no. 2 (1994); Donna Vojvodich, "The Long Blue Line: 'Sooner Squadron'—First Native American Women to Enlist in the Coast Guard," U.S. Coast Guard (2021); and Oklahoma and Florida newspapers of 1943 and 1944. Rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source's photographs, a portrait credited to Donna Vojvodich and the Coast Guard Historian's Office and a 1943 Tulsa World newspaper picture, are not reproduced.