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 Navajo Lore

A proud and noble people, the native clans and tribes of the southwest have been spiritually bound to the splendid lands for countless generations.

Whether is the wind, the mountains or the spirits of the animals that roam the land, the Navajo (Dine) and Hopi hold all of nature close and dear to their hearts. 

Follow These Links For More
Spider Rock - Dine/Navajo

Coyote and the Rolling Rock

How the Hopi Indians 
     Reached Their World

How the Great Chiefs Made 
     the Sun and the Moon

Origin of the Clans - Hopi

At the Rainbow’s End – 

       Dine Navajo

Rabbit and the Coyote

 

Code Talker Room
Navajo Code Talkers
Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima: the Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their native language--a code that the Japanese never broke.

The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. 

Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.

Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. The Japanese, who were skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. The Japanese chief of intelligence,
Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps, they never cracked the code used by the Marines. 

In 1942, there were about 50,000 Navajo tribe members. As of 1945, about 540 Navajos served as Marines. From 375 to 420 of those trained as code talkers; the rest served in other capacities. 

Navajo remained potentially valuable as code even after the war. For that reason, the code talkers, whose skill and courage saved both American lives and military engagements, only recently earned recognition from the government and the public. 

More On Code Talkers:
Navajo Code Talkers

United States Marine Corps History

Nativeamericans.com

Senator Jeff Bingaman's Code Talker Page