The Navajo Code Talkers In World War II

The Navajo Code Talkers were nomadic, American Indians that played an important role in World War II. During World War II the U.S. Marines were grappling with transmitting messages, whereas the Japanese continued to de-code and rig their cipher system. This led to the U.S. Marines discovering the Navajo language and requesting their help. The Navajo language was a complex language that was not widely known or spoken around the world, other than within the Navajo. Throughout the war, the Navajo were treated poorly and disrespected. Despite being mistreated, the Navajo Code Talkers joined the U.S. Marines and helped successfully win World War II by creating unbreakable codes from their own language.

Philip Johnston was an important man who had

The Navajo language is an interesting and important language that influenced North America. The first languages spoken in North America were made up of diverse tribes from various corners of the continent, the most well-known one: Navajo (Bonsu, 2017). With a vibrant culture currently concentrated in the Southwest of the United States, the history of the Navajo people and language spans centuries having had an influence on the entirety of North America (Bonsu, 2017). The Navajo tribe is part of the Na-Den’e Southern Athabaskan language group and got their name from the Spanish who originally called the Navajo “Apachu de Nabajo” (Bonsu, 2017). Today, the Navajo language boasts of having more than 170,000 speakers, with 7,600 monolingual speakers; it is the second largest recognized tribe by the U.S. federal government after the Cherokee tribe, with over 300,000 registered members (Bonsu, 2017). The Navajo language also has many dialects to which it also played a key role in creating unbreakable codes (Bonsu, 2017). The Navajo language has an interesting sentence structure of Subject- Object- Verb just like other languages that are not English (Bonsu, 2017). There are four vowels that can be short, long, or naizled, meaning air escapes your nose when sound leaves your mouth creating different meanings (Bonsu, 2017). Next, there are consonants: among them are

During the mid-nineteenth century, the United States and the Navajo did not get along, causing many issues. The arrival of fortune-seekers from the eastern United States brought an even more devastating clash of cultures (Aaseng, 1992). Neither the fortune-seekers nor the Navajo trusted each other. The fortune-seekers assumed that the Navajo people had leaders who governed the entire tribe and would command the Navajo to hurt them (Aaseng, 1992). The fortune-seekers got a few of the Navajo to sign treaties expecting all of them to follow, but that was not the case considering many Navajo tribes consisted of widely scattered clans operating independently (Aaseng, 1992). This created conflict with the tribes who didn’t sign, as well as the ones who did, because they were angered at how frequently the treaty promises were ignored (Aaseng, 1992). Violence escalated when General James Carleton ordered Colonel Kit Carson into Navajo land with brutal instructions: Force the Navajo into the stark choice of surrender or starvation (Aaseng, 1992). The fortune-seekers proceeded to destroy everything the Navajo had, forcing them to surrender and go on a 300-mile trek to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico (Aaseng, 1992). The Navajos had no idea where they were