Growing up, Ned, was continuously told that nothing Navajo contained any value. The book represents cultural difference in the most profound way, as that between life and death. Then he traces his time through Boarding Schools, which ultimately led him to the Marines and becoming a Code Talker in the Pacific Theater during World War II.Ĭode Talkers took Bruchac about 20 years to write and offers a fictionalized account of the Navajo contribution to the war that wasn’t acknowledged until 1969. It starts with Ned’s earliest memories growing up on the Dine – Navajo land in Southwest United States. The telling begins with Ned surrounded by his grandchildren. They will love the war element and I will love that they are looking at it from a different angle.Ned Begay, the narrator of the story is a proud member of the Navajo Tribe.
This is great historical non-fiction and I plan to use it this year with a boy's book club. We must never forget, as the Japanese forgot, that all life is holy. Never forget, grandchildren, that we must always see all other people as human beings, worthy of respect. They believed only Japanese were real humans.
What troubled me the most was the way they treated the native people of the islands they conquered. You know, grandchildren, for a long time even after the war, it was hard for me to have any good thoughts about the Japanese. Bruchac inserts such wisdom among the awful horrors of boarding school and the war. Ned's journey shares such an overlooked part of history one that I knew about but only on the barest surface. The story is told from Begay's memory as he shares with his grandchildren. Marines have a special use for Navajo enlistees and he is able to be specially trained to send codes using the exact language he had been beaten for using at boarding school a wonderful twist! He is 16 when war breaks out and he wants to enlist but waits until the next year with his parent's permission. He chooses to follow the rules and gets sent on to secondary school. His school journey begins and ends with disrespectful and mean teachers yet he survives and does well. (8)īoarding school takes away their beautiful Navajo clothes, their symbolic long hair, their language, and even their names. Yet all the laws of the United States, those laws that we now have to live by, they are in English. Our Navajo language is sacred and beautiful. To learn the ways of the bilagaanaa, the white people, is a good thing. You are not going to school for yourself. Little Boy, he said, Sister's first son, listen to me. His uncle drives him there in a wagon and gives him this advice:
Kii Yazhi is six years old when he is taken from his mother, from his land to go to boarding school governed by the United States.
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