 Hello from the National Archives Public Programs and Education staff. My name is Sarah Lyons Davis and I'm an education specialist in New York. Welcome to our Young Learner's Children's Book Program with Joseph Bruschak, author, musician, and storyteller. Mr. Bruschak is a proud Nylhegan, a Beniki citizen, and a respected elder among his people. He has authored more than 170 books for children and adults. His best-selling Keepers of the Earth Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children series, with its remarkable integration of science and folklore, continues to receive critical acclaim and to be used in classrooms throughout the country. In his illustrated book, Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code, he depicts the life of an original Navajo Code talker while capturing the importance of Navajo heritage. In the early 1940s during World War II, a small group of Navajo men were gathered to assist the U.S. with coded communications during the war. This group formed the Navajo Code Talkers, who developed an unbreakable code using the Navajo language. This allowed the U.S. to send messages to military units without the enemy knowing what was said. One of the most significant communications aided with the assault on Iwo Jima, the Code Talker mission was a secret operation, so secret that the public didn't know about it until 1968. The National Archives holds several records related to the Navajo Code Talkers, including this photograph in our online catalog of Preston and Frank Toledo sending messages. You can also find educational activities about the Navajo Code Talkers and our DocsTeach site at docsteach.org. The first activity shows the first 29 Navajo U.S. Marine Corps Code Talker recruits being sworn in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico in 1942. Another activity seen in this slide shows members of the 3rd and 4th Division Navajo Code Talker platoons of World War II. They're dressed in their unit's uniform as they pose for a group photo during a 1987 commemoration of the landing on Iwo Jima. We'll take audience questions at the end of the presentation. If you have a question for Mr. Bruschek, please enter it in the YouTube chat box. The chat box is monitored by National Archives staff. Please let us know where you're watching from today. All our programs are brought to you from the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team and the National Archives Foundation. And now, let us give a warm welcome to Joseph Bruschek. Guai Guai, Nithon Vak. Hello, my friends. I've just spoken those words in my own native language, which is a Benike, one of the Algonquin tongues of the Northeast. And I said, my name is Joseph, we're the peaceful one. I'm of the area called the Saratoga in the Adirondack Mountain Region. Alobania, a human being, is what I am. I think one of the great lessons of the Navajo Code Talkers is that native languages are very powerful. Native languages convey within them things that we may not find in English and also, quite frankly, every language has power and is deserving of respect. But before I go further, I want to do something which is traditional among my own people. And that is when we are coming to a new location. If we're traveling, the old days would be by canoe. As we approached another village that was not our own, we would sing a song asking permission to land our canoes. And so with the aid of this drum of mine, I'm going to share with you one of those greeting songs asking to be welcomed. And it simply is saying hello and asking permission to be invited on shore. It's important to remember that the longest war of the United States ever was involved in was what was called the Indian Wars. Wars of dispossession and conquest waged to get hundreds of different Native American tribal nations, often resulting in treaties which were supposedly legal agreements to be kept by both sides, which were always, quite frankly, broken by the United States. The Dine or Navajo people during the period of the American Civil War resisted what was happening in their communities and their lands. They were actually before the United States gained control of that part of the continent. The Mexican government was there and often the Dine people, the Navajos, were at war with Mexico because Mexicans were taking them as slaves, were destroying their villages, their communities, and they were engaged in self-defense. And when the United States took over, unfortunately, the U.S. often cited much more with those who saw things from the Mexican point of view than from the indigenous point of view. It resulted in a war that took place, again, during the Civil War, a man named Kit Carson, who was serving for the United States Army, managed to defeat and then take into captivity virtually the entire Navajo nation. They were sent on something called the Long Walk to a place called Queer Dich, which was a concentration camp in the desert of the Southwest where many people died and somehow, and some say it was because of the intervention of the holy people, of the messengers of the creator, the Dine people, the Navajo were able to return to Dine, to their reservation communities, which are found in the four corners of the states of the Southwest. And the current Navajo reservation, which is broken up in several different areas, houses the largest number of Dine or of any Native American people in the United States. It's a huge area, often desert, and people often living very far apart in that area, and in many cases, still using herding as a primary way of life, herding goats and sheep and other animals. So that is a little bit of background, but there's more that I have to say as well. And that is that following the 1870s, the policy which was taken by the United States government to solve the so-called Indian problem was not any longer to engage in warfare, the last warfare against Native people officially concluded with the surrender of Geronimo Bjarthlich, who was a Chiracala Apache resistance leader in the latter part of the 1880s. But before that, something new was introduced. Thanks to a man named Richard Pratt, who was a lieutenant in the United States Army, a program called The Boarding Schools began. Back up a little bit again, Pratt was an officer in the 10th Cavalry, which was made up entirely of African American soldiers and white officers. And Pratt actually had less prejudice than many people of his time, and felt that when he saw how black soldiers could perform just as well or better than white soldiers, he thought after a war called the Red River War of 1870, when a group of people of the southern plains gathered together to try to drive out the buffalo hunters unsuccessfully. A group of several dozen indigenous men and some women were taken as prisoners of war to Florida, under the charge of that same Lieutenant Richard Pratt, who dressed them in military uniforms, had them march, taught them English, gave them Bible classes, and discovered they were extremely good students and got the idea of creating the first large Native boarding school, Carlisle, in a former Army barracks in Pennsylvania. So many, many Native people were sent to Carlisle as children and were told at Carlisle, as they would be told at dozens and dozens, hundreds in fact, of other boarding schools in the United States and in Canada, where they were called residential schools, that they had to speak only English. They had to cut their hair short. They had to dress in military uniforms and they had to forget everything about their own culture, to instead take on the culture of the majority American population. That particular experiment was both successful and unsuccessful. It was successful in that it brought indeed many Native children to these boarding schools and taught them English and gave them an understanding of Western culture. But it was unsuccessful in that it destroyed Native families. It deeply impacted Native culture and Native languages, often in many cases were pretty much lost. In fact, of the hundreds of languages that were spoken in the United States by Indigenous people, only a handful are spoken by more than a few people today. And the process of trying to restore our languages and rebuild them is going on all around the continent right now in our various Indigenous communities. The men who became the Navajo Code Talkers were fluent speakers of English for one reason. Every one of them was sent to a boarding school, often a place they did not want to go, a place they wanted to escape from. In fact, in the records of Carlisle, that first very big boarding school, as many people ran away from the school as ever graduated from it. But the idea that they could only speak English was not accepted by many, many Native people who were sent to these boarding schools. They would secretly speak their own language, and I have friends who went to boarding schools. I never did myself, but friends in my generation did. And they told me how they would sneak out at night and they would tell each other stories in their own language, where they would borrow a drum from the school band and go up on a hill and play powwow songs and sing, where they couldn't be found. So there was a lot of subversion on the part of the kids who were in those boarding schools. Sadly, the news these days has had many stories of what happened to other kids in those schools. Many children died. They died of diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza that swept through the schools. And sometimes, quite frankly, they died under very suspicious circumstances. Quite recently there was an article, actually a news article which was widespread, about the Kamloops boarding school in Canada, where hundreds of buried Native children were found behind this former school. And the graves that are being dug up around Native kids of Native kids in schools all over the United States and Canada is still in the news today. So the boarding schools were often brutal places and often places where things just didn't seem to make sense to the kids who were there. I remember Howard Gorman, who I had the honour of knowing. He was the oldest of the Code Talkers. Howard told me that when he was a child, in that boarding school where he went, a Navajo boarding school, he made the mistake of saying the word for greeting something like, hey, to one of his white teachers, which was a polite thing to do, except not the thing they wanted him to do. And he was taken into the basement of one of the buildings, chained to a radiator and fed on bread and water for several days to punish him. Or speaking that forbidden language. Or kids would have their mouths washed out with soap, or they would in some cases be beaten or restricted as Howard was in that story. But when World War II came, some interesting things happened. First of all, you may remember that the Navajo nation was defeated by the United States in war during the American Civil War period and taken into exile and kept in a concentration camp where many died before they could return to their own land. You would think that they might have held a grudge forever against the United States. That was not the case. When word came over the radio that the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, didn't amen all around the reservation, did such things as jumping on their horse and riding to the nearest trading post or the nearest urban center and trying to volunteer to fight for the United States because there is a long, strong and very honorable tradition of protecting your homeland among the Dine and fight, frankly, all of our native nations. They were ready to be soldiers to serve in the United States Army or Marines or wherever. Virtually all of them were told, No, we don't want you. We don't need you. This is a white man's war. Or you can't speak English well enough to be a soldier, so just go back home. That was what happened to many people. But then something interesting was happening, having to do with communications. During World War II and actually during World War I, communications were sent by radio. And the interesting thing about sending a message by radio is that other people may hear that message who are not on your side. And during World War I, to keep those messages secret, they employed the first example of what might be called Indian Code Talking. Many native people volunteered to serve in the United States military. And by the way, proportionately, more Native Americans have served in every single war the United States has fought than any other group. And they received a disproportionate share of medals, purple hearts, and other honors for this service to defend the United States. So it was not unusual what those Dine men, those Navajo men did, it was followed up by the United States realized because radio communications were being monitored by their enemies that they needed a way to send messages by code. Coded messages are meant to be broken. In fact, the Japanese were very good at deciphering every code that the United States created except for one. And that was the Navajo code. The idea came to a number of people in the military, in the Marines, partially the suggestion of a man who was non-Native but had lived most of his life on the reservation, that the Navajo language would be a great way to send a secret code because only Navajo people could speak the language. At that point in the 1940s, it had never been written, it had not been recorded, and the only people fluent enough to communicate in it were people who were Navajo. There actually were some men who had grown up around the Navajo reservation, who were white men, who said, well, I can speak the language, but when they were tested, it was discovered they could only engage in very simple conversation. It took a person who was truly Navajo to do that particular work. So a group of 30 men were recruited from that idea that a secret code could be created with their language, and only 29 showed up. The story I hear is that the 30th man quite literally missed the bus. So 29 showed up, were taken to a location where they were told their job was to use their language to create a code. Now fortunately, these men spoke English fluently and Navajo fluently, and also were intelligent and well educated, and one of them knew something about creating codes. And so within a relatively short period of time, they managed to create the Navajo code. And the way it was created is very interesting. In terms of codes, you can, for example, say one word to mean another. If you want to say the word for bear, you might say it in a different language, and trust that no one understood that language, that shush and forgive my Navajo pronunciation is not great, which is bear would be a bear. That's one way to do it. But then the other way to do it would be to choose words that don't mean something exactly, but metaphorically do. So you might, instead of saying a bomb, you might say the word for egg in a different language, and that is what the Navajo Code Talkers did. When they referred to bombs, they spoke the word egg in the Dine language. But then there was a second level to make it a double code, and that was to spell out words. So if I wanted to say the letter A in the Dine language, I might say, and again forgive my pronunciation, o la chi. O la chi is ant, so there is the A. And for every vowel, they chose several different words, because often codes are broken by frequency of letters and vowels are most frequent in many languages, and that was solved by using more than one word for each of those letters. So in a very short time, they created that code. And a number of things happened, which my Dine friends were very amused by. What is that? When they first tried to send a radio message by code when they were in California, other people in the military heard it, and not knowing it was Navajo, they were convinced it was Japanese monitoring American radio networks and they sent an alert out all over the state of California. So from that point on, every time someone spoke Navajo code, they would first say something like Arizona, which is of course where many of the Dine people come from, so they'd know anyone who heard it that it was not a message from the enemy who were breaking into American communications. One interesting historical fact, which I find fascinating about the Navajo code, is that in World War I, many languages, at least Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, the various people called the five civilized tribes from the American South who, again, irony on irony, were removed from their land forcibly and sent to Oklahoma, which was first Indian territory and then taken from them and became the state of Oklahoma. Many of those men were recruited to send messages in World War I by radio, and that became known after the war was over. It actually became known to the Japanese military and the Japanese military in the 1920s and the 1930s who were already looking toward the future when they thought there would be a war with the United States. Why? Because Japan is a small group of islands with not many resources, and in order to build a large industrialized society and a large military, they had to find such things as petroleum or gasoline, rubber or tires, and other items which were not grown or found on those islands. They could have done it through trade, but even better, they could do it through conquest. If they conquered, let's say, Malaysia, they would then have access to lots of rubber and so on. So they felt that in the Pacific, the major power was the United States, and if they tried to control the Pacific area, they would be eventually at war with the United States. And they studied what had happened in other wars, and they discovered that Native Americans had been used to send messages in their language. So in the 1930s, Japanese linguists were sent to the United States as students to learn every Native American language they could, but as I've already said, no one was teaching Navajo, it wasn't written down or recorded, so they could not learn that language. When World War II began, and the Navajo Code began being used, it was at first not trusted by the overall military command. They didn't think it would work until they saw it in action and realized how incredibly effective and fast it was. Two Navajo men, one at either end, one at one location, one at another, could send messages to each other incredibly fast, much, much faster than any kind of device that had been created, and no one else could understand what they were saying except those who were trained in the Navajo Code. Even other Navajos could not understand it. One of the things that I found in my research, which was backed up by some of my friends, such as Keith Little, who was the head of the Navajo Code Talkers Association, was that during World War II, there was a place called Bataan, B-A-T-A-A-N, which was controlled by the British and Americans, and it was an area in the Philippines which was taken by the Japanese, and something called the Bataan Death March took place, where these prisoners of war were marched by the Japanese. Many died along the way to prisoner of war camps. And during that Bataan Death March, it just so happened that among those men, among those American soldiers, was a Navajo. And at first, the Japanese thought maybe he was a Japanese American. Perhaps they could recruit him to their side, and then someone realized he was actually an American Indian. They discovered he was Navajo, and they got very excited, and they took him to a place where there was a radio, and they put the earphones on his head and said, What are you hearing? And he listened, and he said, Someone is speaking Navajo, and everybody was really pleased. Oh, good, good, good. What are they saying? And this man said, I have no idea. It doesn't make any sense to me. And they thought he was lying, but he wasn't because the code was so effective that as I said, even a Navajo could not understand what was being talked about without having learned the code. So he was very badly treated during World War II in these prisoner of war camps. And at the near the end of the war, he was sent to one of the southern islands of Japan where they had a prison in the lower, lower basement of a building, an area that I understand was once a meat locker, and that was where he was locked up, luckily, because the city he had been taken to was called Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. And he survived because he was locked in that meat locker. Well, after World War II, he came home, and many of his friends who had survived the war who were also Navajo were there. And one of his very best friends he spent a lot of time with was a code talker, but he didn't know it. Because until 1968, no one divulged the existence of that code. And all the Navajo men had sworn secrecy and did not tell anyone. So when the news came out, I think he heard it on the radio or saw it in the newspaper. This man who had been the prisoner of war went to his best friend's house, knocked on the door. The man who had been a code talker answered the door, and his friend said, because of you, I had an atomic bomb dropped on me. One of the things I should point out that is really significant for me is that in all of our native cultures, humor is a very important thing. We say that laughter makes us human. I was never around any Navajo code talkers without jokes and laughter and teasing being part of the equation. And that was even true when they were in the theater of war, that people would tease each other or make jokes and stay calm when everyone else was falling apart or in panic, but not the Navajo code talkers. And the idea of humor, well, I'll give you a personal example of that. I was a number of years ago, about 10 years ago, invited to the state of Arizona and to do talks about my earlier book, which is called Code Talker, which is a novel based on the experiences of those men in World War II. And it's very, very deeply researched. I spent over a decade researching the work to create that novel and talking with, learning from, meeting people who were code talkers, friends of mine who were Navajo historians, linguists and so on. So I did a lot of work to make the book as accurate as possible. And in the book, I tell the story, as I heard it, about two Marines, Navajos, who were in a foxhole on one of the islands during an aerial bombardment and bombs were landing all around them. And all of a sudden, one of the guys in the foxhole started shouting, I'm hit, I'm hit. And the other guy turned on his light and discovered that on top of the guy's helmet was a great big frog that had jumped into the foxhole so he hadn't actually been hit by anything dangerous. It's a funny story. Well, I was at this one particular panel with several other code talkers, one of them Samuel Holliday. By the way, Samuel Holliday is one of the only two code talkers, as is the other, who wrote a book about his experience. Samuel Holliday's book is called Under the Eagle, and he dictated it in Dine in Navajo, and then it was translated, I think it was by his son if I remember right, into English and then published. So Samuel is sitting next to me and he tells that same exact story because he was the guy in the foxhole who turned on the light and saw the frog. Every time he said, I'm hit, he punched me in the shoulder. And that guy said, I'm hit. Man, I'm hit. He kept saying I'm hit. He hit me about five times in the shoulder. And even though he was 90 years old, he hit like a horse kicking. It was pretty hard. And he was laughing as he was doing it. So when our program was over, one of the people in the audience came out to me and said, I can see that the Navajo code talkers like you, but why were they beating you? And I said, that's the Dine sense of humor. They always tease your friends. I have had the privilege, as I said, of meeting many of the code talkers. I will be honest, I never got a chance to meet Chester Nez. I met many of his friends, but Chester had passed away by the time I was asked if I could write a picture book about his story and his son and his grandson helped me. They found pictures of Chester himself in uniform and before then and after then. And those were used in creating the pictures for the book. I should also mention the fact that the idea of making a picture book about the Navajo code talkers was my first idea more than 20 years ago. I got the idea, this would be a great picture book. I honestly believe, and I think that's not something you can question, that knowing more about history is important and that often the books that have been written about our native people and the things that have happened in history have been written by non-native people, sometimes in a way that's stereotyped or even racist and often very inaccurate. And I wanted my own kids and other children to have the accurate information I never had when I was a child. I'm now 80 years old, so when I was young there wasn't even television. But there were books, I've always loved books and I was always disappointed because everybody who was Native American in these books was either a vanishing Indian like James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohigas or some kind of really dangerous violent savage who was uncontrolled and the world would be better off without them. And I knew that wasn't what people were like. Native people are people just like any people. It's good, it's bad, it's in between, but also with rich history and with strong culture. So that idea was that I would write a picture book and my friend Phillip Lee, and a wonderful publisher called Lee and Low, which does amazing multicultural work, said he would like for me to do that book. So I wrote a first draft and gave it to him and he made suggestions and I did a second draft and then a third draft. This went on, draft after draft after draft. Phillip asking for more information, wanting things to be made clearer. And finally after I believe it was the 10th draft, Phillip said, Joe, this should be a novel. But we're not publishing novels right now. You have my permission to take it somewhere else. And at that point I thought, okay, and I took it to one of my other publishers that dialed books and the book was published as a novel. And then many years later, the opportunity came to do a picture book. I felt very honored to do that because Chesternes was an incredible man. Actually, quite frankly, I never met a code talker that I did not respect and see as a person of great integrity, of great courage, of tremendous knowledge and of devotion of the kind that you don't always see that idea that they would be so true to their word. They wouldn't tell anyone about what they've done even though, and this is an irony, after World War II ended, virtually all of those men with one or two exceptions left the war as a private and there was no indication in their record of what they had done, that they were radio specialists and communication specialists. It wasn't there. So they couldn't use their experience to get better jobs. And even more ironically, most of them came back to the Navajo Reservation and because they were living on the reservation and they were Native Americans, they were not eligible for what was called the GI Bill, which provided benefits for people for education, for building homes, for lots of things if you were a soldier who had been in the United States Service in World War II, but those men did not get any of those special privileges. In fact, they, in many cases, were still badly treated because there was a lot of prejudice against Native Americans. In the end of the novel, Code Talker, I retell the story that a friend of mine was told who was one of the Navajo Code Talkers that he went into a bar and as he walked into the bar, which is just off the reservation, the bartender pointed at the sign and said, no Indians served here. And my friend said, I don't want an Indian, I want a beer, and they threw him out the door but he would even make it a joke at that point. But the idea of a Navajo Code Talker, of a person using their forbidden language to help the country that had treated their people so badly in the past, to me is an inspiration. It reminds us that we can repay bad with good, that we can draw things out of our cultures that will be useful not just to ourselves but even to others beyond our cultures, that every person, every culture, every language deserves to be respect. No matter who they are, where they are, they deserve to be listened to. And that is what I've done with the two books I've written and that most recent one of course, Chesterness and the Unbreakable Code which I'm very honored to have been invited to do and pleased to be able to share that information about it with you today and the background behind it all. I know that there was some interest in having some questions so if you'd like to ask me a question now I think that our hosts can set that up so that we can do some Q&A. Yes, thank you so much. That was such an interesting and inspiring story and we're just so honored that you came and shared it with us today. So thank you and I'll let you know we have friends watching from across the country including New Mexico, New York, Virginia. So a lot of people here today to hear your story and your message. So if you do have time, we do have a question. Some of those folks want to know does the Navajo language survive today? Does the Navajo language survive today? Yes, it does. I would say of all the languages spoken by Indigenous people it probably has the largest language base in terms of people who are fluent speakers. So it is still there. There are some people who are writing in the Navajo language. Actually, a dear friend of mine named Rex Lee Jim when he was at Princeton University he published his first book shortly after that in the Navajo language decades ago and he's one of the people who is a language teacher and a leader of his people. He was formerly the assistant tribal chairman not too long ago and the idea of maintaining a native language is tough these days because a lot of young people are so connected to these things that they don't think in terms of anything outside of that majority culture experience. So almost every native language in this country is threatened to one degree or another. Perhaps Navajo less than many but still there's not the same number proportionately of young people speaking the language as there was let's say 30 years ago. So I feel that it's very important for all of our languages because of the messages they contain, the power they hold the way you can say things in a native language that are not said in English for example if I were to say thank you in a Benike I'd say Oleonee. Oleonee is good. Oleonee implies the process of returning. So by saying thank you I'm returning good to you for the good you gave to me and I think that is indicative of something that is not exactly the same in English or if I were to say anger I would say someone's angry our word for moose by the way is moose and moose means a strange one and if you're angry in a Benike we say you are mooswalda which means you are behaving strangely anger is a strange way to behave it's not a powerful thing in a good sense but a powerful thing in a disruptive sense because it turns things around now that's not exactly an English way of thinking that's just a couple of words I imagine when you're speaking a language that has all of these connections to many things including to the natural world and to your perception of the world around you and within you so to maintain our languages is very important I mean even things like Native American sign language which was widely used throughout the continent to say happy you'd say the sun is in my heart beautiful way of saying it very poetic and the poetic nature of indigenous languages has been commented upon for a long time by people who encounter those languages and understand how and what they're saying that's wonderful to hear and so interesting to learn some of these words thank you for that and I see so we're nearing the end of our program but we always want to ask this one final question for our author what advice do you have as an author and storyteller that you could share with our youth today I would say one of the most important things to do is to remember that the creator you can see no ask the great mystery gave every human being two ears that's because we're supposed to listen to more than one side of every story but also we have only one mouth which means we need to listen at least twice as much as we talk because listening is the best way to start in fact many of the traditional stories in the southwest begin with a native word which literally means listen or pay attention so I would say that to you that all of you my friends I hope you'll listen and keep listening and I want to thank you for listening to me today and when we part we don't say goodbye but we say in the Beniki language which means may you have a good journey and Wulipam Kani Nidopa travel well, good journeys my friends thank you so much Mr. Breschak I just see in our chat too we're having people joining us from Kentucky now as well so this truly was a national experience for all of us and we so appreciate everything that you shared so thank you so much and as we end I just want to show that docs teach slide again the members of the third vision Navajo Code Talkers platoons of World War II dressed in their units uniform as they pose for a group photo during a commemoration of the landing on Iwo Jima in 1987 I see two of my friends and they're Keith Little and Samuel Smith Jesse Samuel Smith oh wonderful thank you you've really brought to life this history and given us so much context to consider as we learn about this history and more so we are so appreciative thank you now we hope to see you at our next program the National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners program meet George Mason on December 8th at 11am Eastern Standard Time thank you for joining us today