After accepting Philip Johnston’s offer, Marine recruiters visited Navajo schools in Fort WIngate, Arizona and Shiprock, New Mexico to find the most educated Navajos to create an unbreakable and successful code. The Marines agreed to only take 30 Navajos, because they didn’t want to lose much money in case of a disaster. After a long search and the men were selected, the chosen Navajos were taken to a San Diego training camp in California (Aaseng 22). While living in the camps, Navajo men had to adapt to many different things such as new foods, living quarters, mechanical equipment, and competition which was never part of Navajo culture. These were all hard, temporary parts of life for the Navajo, but not as hard as adjusting to military discipline (Aaseng 27). Navajos never hurt anyone, so the physical discipline was hard, cruel, and new to them. The physical training, however, came easily to the Navajos because these men were used to being tired and walking (Aaseng 28). After training in San Diego, the Navajos were sent to a camp right outside of San Diego in a town called Pendleton to learn how to communicate messages. During their time at the Pendleton camp, Navajos studied Morse Code, the techniques of military message writing, wire laying, pole climbing, communicating procedures, and using radios (Aaseng 29). When the Navajos were finally able to start creating the written code, they were given 211 English words likely to be used to during the war. Their goal was to create a written Navajo equivalent for each word. Navajos were given strict instructions to have their code fully memorized because the U.S. needed acceleration and speed from their translators. The U.S. set up rules and requirements regarding creating the code.... ... middle of paper ... ...ainees were sent to the Navajo Reservation to recruit eligible volunteers to be Code Talkers, just under 94% of those were recruited. Some men ate food or drank pounds of water in order to become the required weight (Aaseng 35). A major contribution the Code Talkers made was getting most of the military where they were supposed to be through communicating (Aaseng 36). By the end of World War ll, 420 Code Talkers Served in the war (Aaseng 72). All in all, the Navajos showed much bravery and will while serving in the war. Although the Navajo Code Talkers made many contributions during World War ll, their life didn’t change after they came home. Not until 1971, more than 25 years after World War ll, people recognized the Navajo Code Talkers (Aaseng 105). Works Cited Aaseng, Nathan. Navajo Code Talkers: America's Secret Weapon in World War II. New York: Walker, 1992.
passage: "The courage and resistance shown by the Navajos at Big Mountain, by Polish workers,
In the marines, Natives were treated with more respect compared to what he was used to at home. At boot camp Ned was the smallest there but definitely not the weakest. The Navajos groups always did much better than everyone else since they were used to hard work and walking long distances at a time. Some of the Navajo marines were taught to be code talkers. They were taught the existing code which used the Navajo language since it was the hardest of the Native languages to learn. Code talkers were the only ones who knew the secret code used by the military to send messages. Ned was one of these code
Seldom has it ever occurred that heroes to our country, let alone in general, have had to wait decades for proper acknowledgement for their heroic deeds. This is not the case for the Navajo Code Talkers. These brave souls had to wait a total of six decades to be acknowledged for their contributions to the United States and the Allied Forces of WWII. The code talkers were an influential piece to the success of the United States forces in the Pacific. Thus had it not been for the Native Americans that volunteered to be code talkers, there might not have been such a drastic turn around in the fighting of the Pacific Theatre.
Only about 20 Navajos served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines. The Navajo soldier,
He was seen as wanted and needed in the Marines, because he was in order to send coded messages to the allied forces. Ned explains, “For so many years I had been in schools where I was told never to speak our sacred language. I had to listen to the words of bilaga’anaa teachers who had no respect at all for our old ways, and who told us that the best thing we could do would be to forget everything that made us Navajos. Now practically overnight, that had all changed.”(Burchac 81) As Ned explains, for the Navajos they were told to stop being Navajo, but now as they become Code Talkers that all changes.
The story Navajo Lessons conveys the theme that “It is important to learn and appreciate your heritage.” This story is about a girl, Celine, and her brother that visit her grandmother on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Celine arrives at a place in the middle of nowhere at her grandmother’s house and is not excited because she had better plans for the summer. Her family is encouraging her to deal with it and make something good out of it. Over time, Celine learns that this trip was worth it because she realized that it is important to learn and appreciate your heritage. Celine learned this in many ways, one of them being that she wanted to learn and listen to the stories that her grandmother was telling.
During the first World War, the US military saw great benefits in relying on the Choctaw and Comanche languages to relay important messages in the battlefield (Bixler 37). When World War II began, it was the idea of an anglo-american called Philip Johnston who suggested to once again use Native American languages to send important messages during the war (Bixler 39). Philip Johnston was a World War I veteran who was born in 1892 to a missionary who lived in the Navajo Reservation. Growing up, Johnston was able to become a fluent speaker in the Navajo language and during World War II, he alongside 4 other Navajo Indians were the first to help develop the Navajo language as code for the war (Bixler 39). This turned out to be a great idea because according to a book title “Navajo Code Talkers” by Nathan Aaseng, in the year of 1940, there were “fewer than 30 people outside the Navajo tribe that knew their language (19). In addition, during the years prior to the start of WWII, Germany had sent out German students to study various Native American tribes, but they failed to connect and penetrate the Navajo tribe during those years(Aaseng 19). Thanks to this, the Navajo code talkers became one of the most well known and effective code units during and beyond the end of WWII. It is estimated that as many as 3,600 Navajo tribe members served overall during the years of WWII (Aaseng 10). Out of those 3,600 members, about 540 of them enlisted in the marine corps and about 420 became qualified as Navajo Code Talkers (Paul 117). These Code Talkers played a huge role in many of the biggest battles against Japan in the Pacific arena. A quote from communications officer Major Howard M. Conner of the fifth Marine Division states that if “Were it not for the Navajo, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima”(Davis
To understand the effort and significance of these works, first one must understand its people. The Navajo are thought to be descendants from the people known as the Athabascan's, who migrated from Northwest of Canada and Alaska to the American Southwest around 1200 to 1500 CE . In the 16th century the Spanish conquistadors appeared in the Southwest and by the late 16th century began to subdue many of the native Pueblo people. It was because of this that many of the Pueblo people migrated westward into Navajo territory. Prior to this the Navajo had types of weaving. It is thought that they adopted weaving as well as some agricultural and ceremonial practices from these Pueblo people. This newly adopted craft was further changed with the introduction of sheep brought in by the Spanish .
The Navajo Indians used to live in northwestern Canada and Alaska. 1,000 years ago the Navajo Indians traveled south, because there was more qualities they had seeked there. When the Navajo Indians traveled south there was a lot of oil in the 1940’s. Today the Navajo Indians are located in the Four Corners.
During the 1850's and 1860's the U.S. Army built Fort Defiance within the heart of the Navajo land. The horses, mules and cattle raised by the whites competed with the Indians' sheep for scarce grazing lands. When the Navajo complained of this, the commandant of the fort sent soldiers who slaughtered large numbers of the Indians' livestock.
Denetdale, Jennifer. Reclaiming DineÃÅ history: the legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Print.
The Navajo tribe is the largest Native American group in Arizona. They first descended from the Apaches, who came from the Pueblos, also known as the Anasazi. The Navajo are known for weaving blankets, raising sheep, and generally being a peaceful tribe. Typically, the Navajo tribe was deeply religious, worshiping their common possessions, such as livestock and homes. The Navajo women were primary leaders in society. The typical Navajo's life was a wealth of culture.
Ned goes to boot camp where they whip him into shape, but all of the challenges are not as hard for the Navajos because they had to do them in everyday life in their village. After they complete boot camp, a few Navajo soldiers are sent to more training, training to become code talkers. The training was very secret because they had to speak the code that no one else would know.
Although this idea had been successfully implemented during World War I using the Choctaw Indian's language, history generally credits Philip Johnston for the idea to use Navajos to transmit code across enemy lines. Philip recognized that people brought up without hearing Navajo spoken had no chance at all to decipher this unwritten, strangely syntactical, and guttural language (Navajo). Fortunately, Johnston was capable of developing this idea because his missionary father had raised him on the Navajo reservation. As a child, Johnston learned the Navajo language as he grew up along side his many Navajo friends (Lagerquist 19). With this knowledge of the language, Johnston was able to expand upon the idea of Native Americans transmitting messages in their own language in order to fool enemies who were monitoring transmissions. Not only did the Code Talkers transmit messages in Navajo, but the messages were also spoken in a code that Navajos themselves could not understand (Paul 7).
by Colonel James W. Forsyth. An argument started with a deaf Sioux named Black Coyote. The