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We don't have a majority of the witnesses seeing any latin in Cooper. are you stating possibly a small amount? what about the "Mid Western" accent? 

It's a possibility, and we should take a look at it....

Only one person describing him as Latin doesn't hurt my hypothesis because I'm not arguing he is Latin, I"m arguing that he was someone with olive skin with an indeterminate ethnicity.

I have no idea what type of accent the Natives have in that area. Around here they sound like everyone else in that they have southern accents.

I did find this clip of someone from the Yakama Nation speaking.

That sir is NOT a Midwestern accent or grammar, as we gather to speak of the things which cannot speak for themselves, the water, the salmon, the stars, and the hi ... jacking, and the ones that came before us before we had the casino, and the moose?
 

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Only one person describing him as Latin doesn't hurt my hypothesis because I'm not arguing he is Latin

I'm just wondering how much of his heritage could of been noticed. this is where it would be valuable to hear from the witnesses about there statements. we all know that's almost impossible 

Well, when Lewis and Clark came through on the Columbia the Indians did try and charge them rent. In "negotiable American currency.! That is a very old Indian phrase.

Here is a Native Vietnam vet talking. Not quite the "one with the earth" vibe to it

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That sir is NOT a Midwestern accent or grammar, as we gather to speak of the things which cannot speak for themselves, the water, the salmon, the stars, and the hi ... jacking, and the ones that came before us before we had the casino, and the moose?

That's also someone trying to sound like a traditional Native as he gives his "one with the earth" speech. Get that dude talking about a Seahawks game and he isn't going to sound like a character from Dances with Wolves.  I promise you that.

I have a degree in Linguistic with field work in the Northwest to Slave Lake area.

I know how natives from a number of tribes talk, ie their phonology and grammar. I also know how various Midwestern dialects sound and grammatically express their thoughts. You are preaching to the choir. The cadence in native American tongues is generally carried forward in their English no matter what the phonology is and the phonology and/or grammar usually get affected in some way. Every human utterance is a dialect of some kind.

The FBI has a vast linguistic data base with people to judge such matters.
 

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I have a degree in Linguistic with field work in the Northwest to Slave Lake area.

I know how natives from a number of tribes talk, ie their phonology and grammar. I also know how various Midwestern dialects sound and grammatically express their thoughts. You are preaching to the choir.

The FBI has a vast linguistic data base with people to judge such matters.

It's my understanding that "preaching to the choir" means you are talking to people who already agree, so are you saying that I'm correct to suggest that the "I just learned English from the white man 15 minutes ago" accent is a put on or are you saying I'm wrong? I've never met any Indians that really talk like that, but maybe that is different with Natives in the south who have had well over 100 years longer to be "westernized" than their Northwest counterparts.

Also, concerning linguistics, are we really that confident in the "Midwestern" theory since the only people who spoke to him were hardly qualified experts. In a court of law I'd put a lot more trust in a lay person's assessment of an individual's height or weight than in someone's ability to recognize an accent or someone's lack of one.

You are the linguist, so obviously I defer to your vast knowledge of this matter.

No, Im not sure Cooper spoke with what I (or linguists) would classify as a Midwestern accent. In the sense used, "Midwestern" simply implies lack of palpable speech affects that would point to say southern, upper midwest, New Yorker, Bostonian, foreigner, or some other gross category. All speech gets filtered through the mind of the listener. Both Flo and Tina were from the east coast? They probably were saying Cooper had 'neutral' speech without any particular accent that made itself clear. To them that equals Midwestern. It's a gross characterisation saying they did not detect a particular "accent".

Rather than trying to guess what Flo and Tina meant, I would have to hear Cooper's speech to make some judgement. His idioms "get the show on the road" and "no funny business" both have the origin in the Midwest, but I'm not even sure how far one can go with that because by 1970 those idioms were almost universal in a broad swath from east coast to California and even in certain English speaking areas of Canada.

My guess is any native American raised on a reservation  by other native Americans probably would have signs of that background in his or her speech. And it could be noticed.

But, everyone has an "accent"  from some dialectical background. It's unavoidable. I debated that with Carr but never could get him to admit that.

We would have to have a recording of Cooper to know what his linguistic background was. Evidently no recordings of Cooper were made or exist.


   

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We would have to have a recording of Cooper to know what his linguistic background was. Evidently no recordings of Cooper were made or exist.

In the same respect we would need a picture of Cooper to know his possible nationality, no? shouldn't we be looking at all possibilities?

What are we trying to accomplish here, the fact of Cooper possibly being of Indian decent, or that he came from the reservation?

In my theory, the reservation MUST be an integral part of it since I think that is where he was trying to get there in order to complete his escape. In my imagination I would think he was a member of the Yakama Nation as well because he would need to be familiar with the area.

fwiw, I checked out the Yakama Warriors Association webpage and got these pics.

This dude on the right doesn't look all that "Native".



Holy crap, look at all the DB's!! 

I see a lot of Kenny Christiansen's  in that bunch 

lol that too