History Books

I love reading about different cultures. I often read historical fiction for just that purpose. Yesterday, in the gift shop at Wupatki National Monument, I found a different type of history book. One was about Kachina Dolls and the other about the Navajo Code Talkers. Here’s what I learned.

Kachina Dolls

Kachina Dolls are not gods. They are more like characters in a morality play. Some are good guys and some are bad guys. And, just like our Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, different ones are associated with different days. On those days adults dress up in the appropriate costumes and act out the plays as a way of teaching children about good and bad. Then they give dolls they’ve made representing the characters to the children to help them remember.

Navajo Code Talkers

I have been hearing for years about the Navajo Code Talkers and how they helped us win World War II by speaking a code the enemy could not break–their native language. I have always been intrigued by this story and wanted to know more. This book told an amazing story.

In 1942 the U.S. Marine Corps recruited 29 young Navajo men whose commander described them as, “…the first truly All-American platoon…” These men and the others who joined them, 400 in all, served in all six Marine Corps combat divisions in every campaign in the South Pacific. Each one was accompanied by a bodyguard lest these men, who were shorter and darker skinned than Caucasians, be mistaken for Japanese while speaking their “foreign” language.

Most of us are familiar with the military’s alphabet where the letters are represented by words: alpha, bravo, charlie, etc. The Navajo used the same type of alphabet but their words were things that were familiar to them like ant, badger, cow, etc.

Plus they had words for particular military items. For instance, an armored tank was a turtle, a amphibious landing vehicle was a frog, and a grenade was a potato.

The code talkers had drilled into them so firmly that they were NEVER to talk about what they did in the war that most of them were unable to do so even after their secret was declassified in 1968. I read a news story just the other day about a Code Talker dying whose grandchild said something like, “Grandpa talked about the war but he would never tell us specifically what he did in it.”

Since the code was declassified these brave soldiers, 14 of whom were killed in action, were finally awarded many medals, some of them struck just to honor them.

History is Everywhere

Oh, the books I learned all this from? Children’s coloring books.

TTYL,

Linda Sand