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Timeline / Citizenship, Services, and Sovereignty / 1941–45: American Indian war effort in World War II is remarkable

1941–45: American Indian war effort in World War II is remarkable

American Indians have the war’s highest rate of voluntary enlistment in the military. Of 350,000 American Indians in the U.S., 45,000 enlist in the armed forces. In some tribes, 70 percent of the men enlist. In the Women's Army Corps (WACS), hundreds of American Indian women serve. Another 65,000 American Indian men and women go to work in the wartime defense industry, often relocating from rural reservations to cities, where they form the first intertribal urban Indian communities.

Theme
Federal-Tribal Relations
Region
Arctic, California, Great Basin, Great Plains, Hawai‘i, Northeast, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Southeast, Southwest, Subarctic

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Courtesy Library of Congress

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Alaska Native soldiers pose for the camera while in training, Hooper Bay, Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska, 1945

Courtesy Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries