Code Talker (11 page)

The popular belief was that what Fryer fried was the Navajos.

The extermination went on for some six years, with different sections of Navajo land targeted at different intervals. By the time it stopped, the rain had stopped as well, and the grass continued to dry up.

The effect on the Navajo sense of community was devastating. In the time before the massacre, friends and neighbors helped one another. When someone fell sick, neighbors pitched in to care for their animals. Medicine men and women were summoned to cure both people and animals. Neighbors and family assisted by gathering together at night and praying for the sick to recover.

The livestock reduction challenged this sense of community by pitting Navajo against Navajo. Those who kept livestock resented the Navajo exterminators who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Neighbors put up fences to enclose their pastures, saving them for the sheep that they had left. The year-round migration from one community grazing area to another that had always been the norm as I grew up became impossible. As a result, ties between neighbors weakened.

The toll in self-respect was also huge. Families, unable to protect their own livestock, felt powerless. And nothing could have done more to erode the local work ethic. What was the point of working hard to build up wealth, a sizable herd, when the government just stepped in and destroyed it?

The massacre killed more than livestock. It changed the dynamic between neighbors; it changed the meaning of hard work; it changed everything.

After the Long Walk, the livestock massacre is considered the second great tragedy in Navajo history. A story now woven into oral tradition, the extermination is discussed wherever Navajos meet, so that like the Long Walk, it will never fade from memory.

 

 

Hot, dry summer days passed while I herded the remaining sheep, helped with repairs, chopped wood, and generally made myself useful at home. Occasionally adult relatives asked me to translate Navajo to English for them at the trading post. I always liked to help. Translating was interesting, and they paid me with a stick of licorice or peppermint candy. But just as good as the candy was the respect I got for my knowledge. School was paying off.

I hadn't talked during my summer days at home about the fighting at school or about how mean the matrons and teachers could be. I just wanted to enjoy being back in
Chichiltah
with my family. They looked at me with pride and treated me like someone special.

Even so, at the end of each summer I lay awake considering whether I should go back to Fort Defiance. It was so much nicer at home, despite the lack of amenities like hot running water and electricity. Those comforts were nothing compared to being treated well. And at home, I knew exactly what was expected of me, so life, though physically challenging, was stress-free. At school, it was difficult to know what the teachers and matrons wanted.

Still, in the end, I always returned. Even after some years, when Dora fell ill with tuberculosis and spent most of her time in the Fort Defiance sanitarium, I went to class. A couple of years after Dora got sick, my brother Coolidge finished school. Dora, though she recovered from the tuberculosis, was kept at home. So I returned to Fort Defiance alone. I forced myself to go, pushing the dread I felt to the back of my mind.

I wanted to make my family proud.

CHAPTER NINE

Marine Recruit

As the truck navigated rutted paths, heading home toward
Chichiltah,
a tremendous weight lifted from my shoulders. No more matrons. I was the last of the Nez children to graduate from Fort Defiance. While I was a student there, the school had expanded its program to include seventh and eighth grades. But I'd finally completed the two additional years.

Four years of school still loomed ahead. On my first day at public junior high school, in Gallup, New Mexico, I could hardly believe my ears. Navajo. Spoken in the hallways. Navajo!

The classes were conducted in English. But there were lots of fellow Navajos, and when I stepped from the classroom to the hall, I spoke to a few, sometimes in English, sometimes in Navajo. No one hit me across the shoulders with a ruler. I felt liberated!

From the first day, I noticed that the structure of this school differed drastically from Fort Defiance. At Fort Defiance there had been no letter grades. And English dominated the curriculum there, with the intent—I was now aware—of weakening our ties to Navajo culture, binding us to the white culture instead.

Here, at Gallup, there were many subjects. I had to study hard to catch up, but I liked the Gallup school. No matrons watched my every move. No tiny children cried in their beds at night, terrorized by the administration and the older students.

Chichiltah,
although much closer to Gallup than to Fort Defiance, was still too far for a daily commute. So, while attending school in Gallup, I lived nearby at Fort Wingate. The fort boasted a football field and a complex of dormitories. The land, a soft blend of reds, tans, browns, and purples, felt like home. I shared an early-morning bus trip into Gallup each day with other Navajo students.

I finished ninth grade and was partway through tenth when the government again intervened. A Navajo boarding school in Tuba City, Arizona, was my next home. The school, founded by the Hopi Indians, was in desperate need of repair. The Hopis gave the deteriorating building to the Navajos.

Tuba City was a land of sandstone and wind. I spent a couple of years there, and I never grew to like it. In addition to the school building being in bad repair, the food was awful. And there wasn't much to do. We used to steal watermelons and peaches from local Hopi farmers.

I made many friends. But even with friends I found myself bored. News broadcasts told of fighting in Europe, but the United States had not yet joined in the conflict that would eventually be known as World War II.

In Window Rock, Arizona, however, the Navajo Tribal Council foresaw our country's involvement. Rather than waiting for the American government to jump into the fray, in late spring of 1940 they passed a unanimous resolution:

It might surprise non-Navajos to read this declaration of allegiance. No Navajo, however, would be surprised. We have always felt a deep allegiance to our motherland, our Navajo Nation, and our families. To this allegiance is linked a sincere desire to protect all three.

Even though I didn't like Tuba City, if I hadn't gone there, my whole life would have followed a different path. Something happened, something that would impact all of us, all across the country. Pearl Harbor transformed our boredom.

“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!” Word spread through the Tuba City dormitory like wildfire that Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. Soon, we all knew that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii. Hawaii was thousands of miles away, and not yet a state, but it was also the home of a United States Naval base.

 

 

The Japanese had been allies of the United States and Britain in World War I. They had captured a German base in Tsingtao, China, and after the war, they had prospered through expanding trade, becoming a recognized political and economic force in eastern Asia. But their triumph had been followed by the great earthquake of 1923, which destroyed half of Tokyo. Economic disasters followed, in the form of an overabundance of rice, which drove prices down, and tariffs imposed on Japanese manufactured exports by Western nations. Exacerbating this was the burgeoning population. By 1937, the island nation of Japan held, in its limited space, more than eighty million people. Japan's resources were being depleted. The country needed to expand.

Planning to gain natural resources, a market for their manufactured goods, and cheap labor, Japan invaded China near Beijing. After a three-month battle, the Japanese won Shanghai in November 1937. With the capital, Nanking, then threatened, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic of China, relocated to Wuhan. Japan captured the demoralized city of Nanking in December. Japanese-led massacres in the aftermath of the Nanking defeat killed as many as two to three hundred thousand Chinese people.

America, shocked by the violence of the Japanese attack, refused to sell Japan items like scrap metal that could be used in waging war. In the summer of 1941, we nationalized all Japanese assets in the United States. Enraged, Japan signed a pact with Germany and Italy in September. The island nation, now aligned with the Axis powers against the United States, planned attacks on Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Midway, and the Philippines.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States could not ignore their enemy's intent to take over the Pacific. We declared war against Japan the next day, December 8, 1941.

 

 

Our school principal called us all together. He wanted to be sure that we all understood what was going on. He had researched Pearl Harbor, and he shared what he had learned with us students, telling us about the Japanese, their aspirations to control an empire, and the damage they'd done to the United States Navy.

My roommate, Roy Begay, and I discussed the momentous events.

“What do you think this means?” asked Roy.

“Our country has joined the war. I think the military will want us,” I told him. “We are warriors.”

We, like other Native Americans, had been born to the warrior tradition. Like other Navajos, we saw ourselves as inseparable from the earth we lived upon. And as protectors of what is sacred, we were both eager to defend our land.

After gaining permission from the Navajo Tribal Council, Marine recruiters arrived in Tuba City only months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in April 1942. Full of curiosity and excitement, Roy and I listened to their presentation. The Marines showed enthusiasm and pride. They looked strong and capable in their dress-blue Marine uniforms.

The recruiters announced that they wanted young Navajo men who spoke fluent English and fluent Navajo. The men were needed for a special project that would benefit their country. I glanced at Roy. He seemed riveted by the Marines' words. I, too, was intrigued. Joining the Marines would mean leaving school, leaving the reservation and the lives we had always known, and entering foreign territory—the home of the white man. That was scary . . . and intriguing. Joining the Marines would affect the path we traveled for the rest of our lives. It might end our lives, if we were sent into battle.

By that time the Japanese had conquered Hong Kong, Guam, and Wake Island. In a move reminiscent of their attack on Pearl Harbor, they had devastated the Australian port city of Darwin. And they had attacked the Philippines, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove General MacArthur from that archipelago.

Both Roy and I knew that a decision made in haste could lead to dire consequences. We talked it over. I wanted to see how people lived off the reservation. I was curious to learn about the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world. And, more than anything, I wanted to serve and defend my country. That was a man's responsibility. Roy felt the same way, so he and I agreed to take the test offered by the Marines. Three of our friends at school in Tuba City agreed to be tested as well.

We five young men accompanied Marine recruiters to Fort Defiance, Arizona, the place where I had attended boarding school. There, approximately two hundred more young Navajos, mostly from Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation, eagerly applied to become part of the Marines' special project.

Marines require first-time recruits to be between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two. We men had no birth certificates, and several added a year or two to their ages in order to be accepted. At least one man, Carl Gorman, said he was younger than his actual age. He was thirty-five.

The Marines talked to me, interviewing me in English about my family life and my education. I understood every word and responded accordingly, speaking carefully, using my best English. There were no interviews in Navajo. Apparently the Marines assumed we all spoke Navajo.

Silently, I thanked the teachers at Fort Defiance for forcing me to learn English. And I thanked my family for keeping me fluent in Navajo.

When all applicants had completed their interviews, Roy and I waited nervously. Would we make the cut? From the hundreds of applicants, only thirty were to be selected for the secret project.

I wondered what it would be like to be a Marine. Would I make it through the tough physical training I'd heard about? I had been away from home a good part of my life in boarding school, so I knew I'd handle the separation from my family. But I'd have to leave Navajo country entirely, not just my home. I thought about mixing with white and black Marines, not just with other Navajos. Would I be able to compete with those men who had grown up off the reservation, in a different world, a different culture? Would I make my family proud?