Code Talker

by Joseph Bruchac

  Even being beaten did not stop John Roanhorse from speaking Navajo. He was the biggest of the boys and he would stand there, taking a beating without crying. Principal O’Sullivan just about wore himself out hitting him. He even broke one of his favorite sticks over John Roanhorse’s back. So it was decided that a simple beating was not enough. John Roanhorse was taken into the cold stone basement and chained in a dark corner. He was kept there for a week with nothing to eat but pieces of stale bread and nothing to drink but water. When they brought him out, his eyes seemed as small as those of a mole and there was a lost look on his face. I think a part of his spirit was left down in that cold, dark place.

  I was never openly defiant like John Roanhorse had been. Nor was I like the careless boys and girls who kept speaking Navajo when our teachers—who watched us the way coyotes watch a prairie dog hole—could hear them. I did my best to learn English. As the days turned into weeks, then months and years, I began not just to do well in my classes, but to do better than any other student—especially in such subjects as history and geography. Learning and remembering things of the past and finding out about faraway places was interesting to me. I seemed to be a perfect student.

  When my bilagáanaa teachers looked at me, they saw a little Navajo boy who did just what he was told, never got in trouble, and studied hard. Whenever I was called on, I would stand right up.

  “Yes, teacher,” I would say, widening my eyes and nodding my head as I spoke.

  Yes, teacher! Those were the two words I spoke more than any others when I was in mission school. They were like magic. Even if I did not understand something, all I had to do was say those words to make my white teachers nod back at me or smile. Sometimes they did not even ask me to answer the question.

  “Very good, Neddie,” they would say.

  However, I was stubborn in ways the teachers could not see. I spoke nothing but Navajo whenever I was alone with other Indian students. In the basement of the school or out back behind the wood shed, I learned Navajo songs and stories. Some students in that school, especially after being beaten enough times for talking Indian, reached the point where it became hard for them to speak Navajo, even when they wanted to. But it was not that way for me. If anything, rather than taking my language away from me, boarding school made me more determined never to forget it.

  So I held on to my sacred language while learning the words and the ways of the whites. But I had no idea, even in my wildest dreams, that the very language those bilagáanaa teachers tried to erase—the way you wipe words from a blackboard—would one day be needed by important white men.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  High School

  At first, my time in the boarding school did not go quickly. In fact, the days were so long that it sometimes seemed as if each one was a year. Despite the boredom and the loneliness, I kept on working hard. Trying to do well became my way of surviving, just as some of the other students got by simply by going somewhere else inside themselves, showing a blank and stupid face to our bilagáanaa teachers whenever they were asked to do anything. Then those teachers would shake their heads and go on to someone else. Most of those teachers expected very little of us and that was just what some of us gave back in return. But that was not my way. I have always loved to learn, even though the learning they offered us was much less than that given to bilagáanaa children.

  Some of my other classmates survived boarding school by throwing themselves into the sports that we played. The older boys had basketball and baseball and football teams. After we younger boys got to know those sports—which none of us had ever seen before being sent off to school—we, too, became great fans. Some of us wanted nothing more than to become one of those heroic Indian athletes like Jim Thorpe, who wore a sports uniform and did great things on the playing field. Whenever we played a game against other Indian schools, I was always among those cheering loudly for our side. But little I was when I came to school and little I stayed. I grew some, but reluctantly. I’d never be more than a few inches above five feet. I was too small to play sports. I couldn’t hope to become one of those athletes who recklessly threw their bodies against each other with as much energy as our warriors in the old days had hurled themselves at our enemies.

  Even though my body would not grow tall, somehow I knew that there was no limit to the growth of my mind. I read and studied and wrote, and my teachers noticed. I still didn’t speak up much in class—that would have been calling attention to myself or embarassing to the other students who did not do so well in their studies. Instead I just did well on my written work, passing tests with high grades and handing in assignments done in perfect English.

  “Neddie, you are almost as bright as a little white child,” the teachers would say, meaning to compliment me. “You should speak up more in class.”

  Some of them would even pat me on my head, as if I were a little pet monkey that had just done well at obeying a command.

  “Thank you, teacher,” I would answer in a voice just loud enough to be heard.

  Someday, I said to myself, I will become a teacher, one who does not just teach, but also shows respect to all his Indian students and expects the best of everyone.

  I worked hard with that goal in mind. Because I took such interest in my studies and in that good goal of becoming a teacher, time no longer crawled by like a snail trying to get to the top of a big stone. The hours and days, the weeks and months and even the years, grew legs and began to run like an antelope.

  Almost before I knew it, the day came when I graduated from the mission school. For many Navajo students, this was the end of formal education. But I had done so well that I was accepted into the high school program. It made me so happy. There were two good things about the high school program. The first and best was that instead of being a journey of many days, Navajo High School was only twenty miles away from my home. I would still be living in a school dormitory, but now I would be close enough to visit my parents often and the younger brothers and sister who had been born during my years at boarding school. At the old school, I could only go home summers. Now I would be with my family every weekend and every holiday.

  I have said that there were two good things about the high school program. The second was that the teaching was better. Since we had gained that much education, the high school teachers assumed that we were educable. They did not often do such things as use our entire school day cleaning the classrooms and washing the windows of the building. More information was offered to us, along with a real library. I read every book I could get my hands on and welcomed the challenge of better classes. I excelled in English and in social studies.

  One social studies paper that I wrote during my first year in high school I remember particularly well. I did not realize it at the time, but it dealt with people and a place that would change my life forever. Those people lived on a group of faraway islands that they called Nippon, but we Americans knew it as Japan. I had read about how those people were having hard times. So I wrote my paper about their suffering. I discussed how difficult it was for them because there were so many of them on their small group of islands. In a space not much larger than our Navajo homelands, there were 80 million Japanese people. They did not have enough wood or coal to heat their homes. Terrible earthquakes had recently shaken their land. Many Japanese had been killed or injured and their homes had been destroyed. They had no food and shelter and were in need of help.

  My social studies teacher was a man named Mr. Straight. He was tall and thin with a sharp face as pale as the crescent moon. He wore very small eyeglasses that were always slipping down on his nose. Those glasses fascinated us students. We all expected that one day they would slip right off and fall to the floor. That day, when Mr. Straight nodded his head after I finished reading my paper, those glasses slid down to the very tip.

  “Well done, Neddie,” he said to me, quickly pushing his glasses back up on his nose and then tapping me on my shoulder with his long bony index
finger. “I doubt that your average white student could have said it much better.”

  Soon after that, we students at Navajo High School had our own food drive for the poor, hungry Japanese. Even though we came from families much poorer than those average white students, we still were able to collect two big crates of canned goods that became part of the many tons of food relief shipped by America to the islands of Japan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sneak Attack

  From then on, I took a special interest in Japan. I read everything I could find about it, including articles in newspapers and the few magazines in our school library. To my dismay, things in the island nation began to change in an unexpected way. Their military leaders had decided not to rely on help from the rest of the world. They would go to war to get all those things they needed. They were great warriors, those Japanese, and had been for hundreds of years. In the past, no enemies had ever been able to invade their sacred islands. Now, though, their interest was not in defense. They built up a big army and a navy and attacked other countries around them. Soon they had defeated the Chinese and taken over many other islands in the Pacific Ocean. They said it was their divine destiny. The whole Pacific Ocean was meant to be theirs alone.

  On the other side of the world, in Europe, the Germans were saying similar things. It was Germany’s destiny to rule their part of the world. They, too, went to war and conquered other nations around them. They formed an alliance with the Japanese.

  Many people in America were now worried. They feared that the time might come when America would have to go again over to Europe and fight as they had done in my grandparents’ time during World War One. And America had soldiers and sailors in the Pacific Ocean, in the Philippine Islands, and on the islands of Hawaii. They might soon have to defend them-selves from the Japanese.

  For most Navajos, though, the possibility of a war was very far away. Caring for their herds and trying to make ends meet was all they had time to think about. But our Navajo Tribal Council passed a special resolution in June of 1940. I liked their words so much that I made a copy of them on a piece of paper to carry with me in my wallet. I’ve kept those strong words all these years, though I have had to recopy them several times when the paper they were printed on grew worn from being folded and unfolded or when it was soaked by the salt water as we landed on those beaches. It is often that way, you know. Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.

  Here is what our tribal council said:

  Whereas, the Navajo Tribal Council and the 50,000 people we represent, cannot fail to recognize the crisis now facing the world in the threat of foreign invasion and destruction of the great liberties and benefits which we enjoy on the reservation, and

  Whereas, there exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans, and

  Whereas it has become common practice to attempt national destruction through sowing the seeds of treachery among minority groups such as ours, and

  Whereas, we hereby serve notice that any un-American movement among our people will be resented and dealt with severely, and

  Now, therefore, we resolve that the Navajo Indians stand ready as they did in 1918, to aid and defend our government, and its institutions against all subversion and armed conflict and pledge our loyalty to the system which recognizes minority rights and a way of life that has placed us among the greatest people of our race.

  If our help was needed, we Navajos would be ready.

  But when the attack finally happened, it seemed that no one was ready. It was December 7, 1941, a Sunday I will never forget.

  Bright late autumn sun was shining through the windows of our dormitory, but there was no sun in my heart. In the other corner of the room several of my friends were laughing and talking, but I was in no mood for anything but silence. I was still smarting from what had happened to me two days before. I was so embarrassed. Although, as I have explained, I tried to be careful when I spoke our sacred language, that Friday I had been caught. Mr. Straight overheard me greeting one of my friends in Navajo when I thought no teachers were around. It didn’t matter that I could now speak English as well as any bilagáanaa. It didn’t matter how good my grades had been in all my classes. By speaking one word in our sacred language I had just proved to my teacher that I was as hopeless as the rest of my people.

  “Do you want to always be an ignorant, useless savage, Begay?” Mr. Straight had said in a disappointed voice, looking down at me over the top of his glasses. “You must always speak English. Navajo is no good, no good at all.”

  Then he had placed me in front of the whole class with a dunce cap on my head.

  That Sunday, as I sat by the window in the dormitory living room, I had my hand on my head, remembering how that dunce cap felt and how foolish I must have looked to everyone, even though my classmates had all politely averted their eyes from me while I was up there. I was both sad and angry. Would the bilagáanaas never respect me because I was a Navajo? Did I really have to give up everything Navajo to succeed in the modern world?

  Suddenly Tommy Nez came running into the dormitory living room.

  “We’ve been attacked!” he shouted. “It was on the school radio!”

  Some of us looked out the windows to see if the enemies were close by. All that we saw were the familiar hills and the dusting of snow that had fallen the night before. We left the dorm and went running to the main school building where the radio was located. Mr. Straight was at the front door.

  “Come with me,” Mr. Straight said. His voice was tight and nervous.

  He led us all into the hall outside the main office to listen to the radio. It told a terrible story. The Japanese had attacked the United States at a place called Pearl Harbor. Most, if not all, of our planes and boats were destroyed. Many people died.

  We turned to our teacher, but he looked as confused as we felt. No one seemed to know what to do or say.

  “Perhaps those Japanese will attack the Navajo reservation next,” Tommy Nez whispered.

  “Be quiet,” Mr. Straight snapped, pushing his glasses back up onto his nose so hard that he knocked them off and had to grab them before they hit the ground. “Everyone back to your dorm!”

  We did as he said, but nothing was the same anymore. Our whole world had changed. What was going to happen now?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Navajos Wanted

  Over the next days, we learned more about the air raid on Hawaii. We heard the names of islands thousands of miles away where the Japanese were attacking American and Allied bases in the Pacific. Even I, who loved geography, had never heard about most of those places. I had to look hard through the maps in my geography book to locate them. Wake Island, Guam, Guadalcanal. By Christmas of 1941 all of those places had fallen to the Empire of the Rising Sun.

  “You must all sacrifice to help the war effort,” our teachers said.

  Even though I understood what they meant, I could not help remembering that we Navajos had already sacrificed a lot. Most of our families were still poor because of the government livestock reduction of our sacred herds. None of our people were as wealthy as any of the bilagáanaas we saw, especially those who ran the trading posts.

  Poor as we were, we Navajos really did want to help. Our tribal council met at Window Rock and declared war on Germany, Japan, and Italy. Navajo men took their guns, packed supplies, and rode their horses in to report to the Indian agent. They did not know how far away Pearl Harbor was, but they were ready to go there and fight the enemy. However, almost all of those men were told they could not be warriors for the United States because they only spoke Navajo or because what English they spoke was not good enough. That made them sad and ashamed.

  I wanted to join up, too, and go fight the enemy. I could speak English well, but I was only fourteen when that attack came on Pearl Harbor. That was far too young and I was too small to convince anyone that I was older.

  “This war will be over,” I said to my frien
ds, “before I am old enough to enlist.”

  At first, that is what many people thought.

  “Now that America has declared war,” Mr. Straight said, shaking his bony finger at the sky, “the fighting will soon be over.”

  Everyone on the radio and in the newspapers agreed. The Axis powers—that was what they called Japan, Germany, and Italy—would quickly crumble. Sadly, we were all wrong. As the months wore on, it became clear that this war was going to be a long one.

  It also seemed that the U.S. Armed Forces was yet another place where Indians were not wanted. Only a few Navajos had been accepted as U.S. soldiers, all of them men who had been to mission school. There seemed little interest on the part of the U.S. Armed Services in enlisting the help of those of us who had loved this country long before the ancestors of the bilagáanaas came here.

  Then, in April of 1942, everything changed. A message from Chee Dodge, our Navajo tribal chairman, was sent around the reservation by shortwave radio. A Marine recruiter was coming to Fort Defiance looking for Indian volunteers. Not just any Indians, but Navajos. Navajos were needed for special work. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs had given its sanction for Navajos to join up. However, only men fluent in both English and Navajo were wanted.

  When I heard that announcement on the radio, I could hardly speak.

  “Navajos!” I finally managed to say to my friends. “Navajos! They want Navajos! Did you hear that?”

  I was so excited and talking so fast that they teased me.

  “Are you sure that’s what they said?” Tommy Nez asked me.

  “Wehee,” Jesse Chee said. “Yeah. Didn’t they say they wanted Mexicans?”

  But that radio announcement interested those guys, too. Our high school was not far from the tribal offices in Fort Defiance. The Marine Corps recruiter was scheduled to speak the next morning, a Saturday, which meant we had no classes to attend. So the three of us went down there together, just to look at that recruiter. He had been given an office right near our Navajo tribal headquarters and we could see that the door was open.