Washington tried to erase the Navajo language it then used to win a war.
I live on forty acres in Adams County, Wisconsin, that belonged to the Ho-Chunk people long before there was an Adams County — before there was a Wisconsin, before there was a United States to write the treaty that took the ground out from under them. I grew up knowing that the way a boy knows the land he walks without having words for it. It has taken me most of my life to understand what it means. A country does not spend generations punishing its own children for speaking a language and then get to call that same language a gift when it needs it.
The crowd gathering in Phoenix on Aug. 14 is there for Thomas H. Begay, 101, one of the last two living Navajo Code Talkers. President Reagan signed the proclamation in 1982 setting that date aside to honor Begay’s men and all the Native Americans who served in the war. The service those men gave stayed secret for decades; they were ordered to keep it, and they kept it, and most of them went home to the reservation and carried the silence back with them as a duty. The Marines recruited more than four hundred Navajos to build a code out of a language that had no written form — which was the whole point, no letters for anyone to intercept. Congress did not get around to the Congressional Gold Medal for the original twenty-nine until 2000, and the medals themselves were not presented until the summer of 2001 — late enough that plenty of the men who built the code died without a word of it ever leaving them.
Here is the part I cannot set down cleanly, and I have tried. The same government that struck those medals ran the boarding schools. For generations, federal policy was built on erasing the Native languages outright — children taken from their families, beaten for the only words they knew. The Navajos who made the Pacific code came up under that same hand. And then, when the war went badly and the country needed a code no one could break, it reached for the very language it had been trying to kill, used it, and called it a secret weapon. Dawn Manuelito, granddaughter of one of the first twenty-nine, said it plain: “Our language saved this country.” She said it as honor. It is that. It is also an accusation, and it comes from the right person.
We have our own chapter of this up here, and it did not go quietly. The Ojibwe bands won their treaty hunting and fishing rights back through the courts in 1983, and Wisconsin spent years in the fight over it — the boats rocked, the spears raised, the whole ugly business on the evening news. Act 31 now asks our schools to teach the history of the tribes whose land this is. I did not learn that history in school. I learned it later, and shamefully late at that. The tribes of this state managed this country long before the state existed, and they are still here managing it. This spring the descendants of the Choctaw code talkers unveiled a marker at a veterans park in Fort Worth, honoring the earlier war’s men, who worked the same kind of code in France before most Americans had ever heard the word Navajo. That marker came decades late too. The pattern is not an accident.
Wendell Berry has spent a career putting it a way that lands here — that the country has many ways of thanking people that are actually ways of using them. The country uses the language to win the war. The country files the men who carried it under classification. The country waits forty years. The country holds a ceremony when the men are old and signs a proclamation when most of them are gone. That is not gratitude. That is a country working out the schedule of its own convenience.
Aldo Leopold, who gave this sand country its name, wrote that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” — meaning the land and the people on it together. The people who kept that community longest, who had figured out how to live on sand that would not carry a corn crop, were exactly the ones Washington spent generations trying to erase. Then it asked them to save the country. They did. Their reward was another forty years of silence, and medals that arrived late enough to read as apologies.
What I notice about Adams County is the same pattern in miniature. My father has told me what he remembers of the older men in this town who came back from the Pacific — most of them went back to the sawmill, the bank, the feed store, the shop. They didn’t talk about what they had seen, and the country didn’t ask. The Times-Reporter ran their names in 1944 and ran them again when they came home, and that was most of the public record. The country thanked them by forgetting them. The Navajo men’s forgetting was different. Theirs was the kind the country arranged on purpose. The Adams County men came home to a town the next fifty years would hollow out — the railroad going single-track, the bank bought twice, the mill closing, the small stores giving way one buyout at a time. The Navajo men’s forgetting was deliberate. The Adams County forgetting was the slow kind — the kind that comes from chains buying out the bank, the mill, the co-op, the feed store, the clinic, one after another, while the country looks on.
So honor Thomas Begay while he can stand in the Phoenix heat and hear it, and honor all of them. But do not mistake the ceremony for the debt, or the 1982 proclamation — or the 2000 medals — for what is actually owed. A crowd on one day in August does not undo a century of trying to erase the language that is the whole reason the crowd has gathered. The country that tried to kill the Navajo language is down to the last two men who put it to the war. The next time Washington reaches for a people it is currently discarding — the languages it is still letting die, the children it is still failing, every spring the missing and the murdered counted up and counted again — I hope it remembers it has asked this exact thing before, that the people said yes, and that what it gave them back was silence and a late medal. That is the real weight of “our language saved this country.”
I will sharpen a Stihl chain this morning and think about what it costs a country to use a people and then quietly close the file.