Following the U.S. Department of Defense’s recent directive to scrub so-called DEI from its military websites, the Pentagon has now restored – within the last week – all of its content referencing Native Americans and their contributions.
Among them, two iconic Arizonans: Lori Piestewa and Iwo Jima flag-raiser Ira Hayes.
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community shared the news on social media, noting his Valley-based tribe succeeded in convincing the Pentagon to republish info about Piestewa and Hayes, with help from Arizona’s congressional delegation.
“Now, while this information should never have been removed,” said Lewis, “we worked every day to make sure that the accomplishment of Ira Hayes was not swept up in the policies that are distinct from our political status as Native Americans and sovereign tribal governments.”
In the fallout, John Ullyot – who ran the Pentagon’s press shop – has since resigned.
“We fear that at Defense Media Activity headquarters, there may have been some overreach,” U.S. Army Major Wes Shinego told KJZZ. “When the Jackie Robinson story broke for the DOD, for instance, we were like, ‘What is the exact directive?’”
Shinego, the officer responsible for restoring all of the wiped material on behalf of Defense Media Activity, explained they got new marching orders under Ullyot’s replacement, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson.
“If it’s heritage, if it’s history, if it’s a person, we want that content restored,” said Shinego. “His thinking was, ‘We don’t want to scrub the story from history. We’re not going to stop writing about them either.’ Details about tribal history or culture shouldn’t have been – and that’s where the initial scrub went awry.”
Any story that “features a person or community’s contribution to defense” is online once again, while “observation-specific articles which focus heavily – or completely – on an individual’s indelible qualities,“ like heritage months, were the scrub’s actual focus, according to Shinego.
“We want their actions, their sacrifice, to speak for them, and that’s something I could get behind. We pour our hearts and souls into these stories and often interview living service members. We don’t want to let them down,” he added. “And once we solidified what the DOD was actually asking for, we were able to restore a lot of the content that we were, frankly, very proud of.”
