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Code Talker By Joseph Bruchac

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Q4 EOM More than 450 Native Americans including the Navajo tribe enlisted in the United States military to fight in the second world war. This was after the genocide attempts of the Native tribes such as the Long Walk and the westward expansion in the 1800s that exiled over 46.000 indigenous people. Before the file release of the Code Talkers, the Native American troops never received any recognition for their fighting in WWII. In the vivid novel Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac, Navajo protagonist Kii Yazhi (Ned Begay) experiences many profound changes to his cultural identity as a surviving Navajo in a boarding school of assimilation and a Code Talker in the island hopping campaign of World War II. Bruchac demonstrates how traumatic events …show more content…

The boarding schools required all young Navajos living on a reservation to go to the missions. Kii soon realized that the school was an attempt at assimilation of their culture when the principal stated that “‘Navajo is no good, of no use at all!’... Although the teachers at the school spoke in quieter tones than our principal, they all said the same. It was no good to speak Navajo or be Navajo” (Bruchac 18). The Navajo children are immediately told at a very young age that the culture they have been learning from a very young age is considered inferior to the English language and the white men of America. The attempt to forget Indian culture was nearly successful as the instructors in the boarding school made many Navajos agitated and afraid to speak their Native language years after they graduated from the boarding school. In fact, the mission’s motto was “Tradition Is The Enemy Of Progress” (Bruchac 23). It was also written in front of the mission school. The boarding school went to desperate measures to tell the Navajo kids that what they followed was wrong and an enemy of making progress. Many Navajos in the school were affected and it showed how the young kids in the boarding school would be assimilated so that their culture could be wiped off the existence of

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