a memorial salute

Paul Begay
Johnson Housewood
Jimmie Kelly King, Sr
Paul Kinlahcheeny
Leo Kirk
Ralph Morgan
Willie A. Notah
Tom Singer
Alfred Tsosie
Harry Tsosie
Howard Tsosie

You eleven I'm thinking of:  so few know your names.  In the 30s and 40s, many of you were in school.  By 1945, you were dead.  Your countrymen were celebrating victory.  None knew your role in it.

When you were a child, many Americans thought you should lose the language you were born with.    That's the best way to fit in and assimilate, they said:   it's the American way.    Our government took you away from your families and put you into boarding schools, where you were forbidden to speak your own native tongue.    You were abused severely if caught:   beaten, and worse.

But that didn't silence you.    You still whispered Navajo to each other, keeping the language alive. That is the American way.

Your secret rebellion led to secret victory.    The US Marines deployed 381 of your brethren to the Pacific theater.    Your language formed the basis of the only unbroken oral code in modern warfare.    The Navajo Code Talkers took part in every Marine assault in the Pacific war, flawlessly.    370 returned.    You never did.

Many soldiers returned as heroes in 1945, but since your mission was secret, when your fellow Navajo returned to their families, no one knew what they (and you) had done.    The secret remained for over two decades.    But in 1968 the truth came out.    Over two decades after that, an outgoing president awarded you the Congressional Gold Medal as one of his last gestures.    Only 5 were still living.

How many saluted you in life — how many who knew why you were there and what you did? Too few.    Today let us, at last, salute you.

Ahéhee'.