Encyclopedia.com says, “Over 540 Navajo served in the Marines during World War II, nearly 300 served in the field as code and communications experts. Navajo code talkers operated in all six Marine divisions, and served in every major Pacific battle between 1942 and 1945. At the battle of Iwo Jima, a small unit of six Navajo code talkers, under the command of 5th Marine Division signal officer, Major Howard Connor, transmitted and received nearly 1,000 messages in 48 hours.”
I already knew that each Code Talker had two Marines assigned to them to protect them from harm and who were supposed to kill them if the Code Talker had been captured. That was to protect the code from being tortured out of one of them. But I didn’t know they also had to protect them from being shot by other Americans who occasionally mistook the Navajos for Japanese individuals who they assumed were wearing a stolen uniform.
Our speaker became interested in the Code Talkers because her daughter lives on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and she had a patient who was one of the original twenty-nine. The last of the Code Talkers died this year and our speaker did a slide show of many of these guys, telling us what became of them after the war. Many of them suffered from what we call PTSD today, made all the worse because they were forbidden to talk about what they did in the war. The Code Talker program wasn’t declassified for 23 years because the military thought they might use it again. Most of the Code Talkers also didn’t get any military veteran’s benefits because they weren’t considered American citizens of the U.S.A. since they lived on Reservation land.
Reagan, Clinton and G.W. Bush all found ways to honor the Code Talkers and Obama left his legacy, too, by signing bills into law that help Native Americans. Then came Trump who, at a ceremony in the White House where three Code Talkers were being honored he joked about “Pocahontas.” That was bad enough but worse was he held the entire ceremony in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who signed the Indian Removal Act, leading to tens of thousands of Native Americans being forced to relocate, many dying along the Trail of Tears. Was Trump sending a veiled, racist message or is he just that tone-deaf or uneducated that he nor anyone on his staff understood the poor optics he was sending out into the world? Was there was nowhere else in the White House or even in the same room where all the news coverage didn’t have to include Jackson in the photo-opts?
According to our speaker the people on the reservation where her daughter lives were upset about the Jackson portrait and they had no doubt it was a purposeful act of disrespect. (Note how the podium was placed.) When the speaker shared that opinion a person sitting behind me said, “You just had to go there, didn’t you!” I turned around to see who said that and it wasn’t hard to figure out since I always sit in the next to the last row. The woman had a sour look on her face that made me want to laugh at her discomfort. I turned back around quickly so she couldn’t see the smile I was sure was growing on my face. And I don’t want to examine that smile too deeply because I’m pretty sure it’s a character flaw to enjoy another person’s anger. ©