97 pages • 3 hours read
Joseph BruchacCode Talker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Exile, Alienation, and Navajo Culture
Ned Begay is Navajo, and the Navajos have experienced exile as well as physical and cultural displacement in the United States, as exemplified by the Long Walk, which forced them to abandon their original sacred home. The idea of a Navajo reservation represents a forceful curtailment of their homeland. Then, after the Navajo people’s territory is restricted, they’re made to abandon their culture and language through Indigenous boarding schools. The US government tries to alienate Indigenous American children from their customs, religion, and culture, requiring the mission school students to conform to white American aesthetics and to learn English. Children who lapse back into their native language are punished.
When World War Two breaks out, the Navajo men who try to enlist in the military are initially turned away; even when they try to support the country that stripped them of land and culture, they’re prohibited from doing so. They’re left in a sort of limbo where they are not regarded or treated as American citizens, and yet it’s unacceptable for them to be Indigenous American. As Ned reflects, “It was no good to speak Navajo or be Navajo. Everything about us that was Indian had to be forgotten” (18).
Ned and his fellow Navajos aren’t the only ones who experience exile and alienation in the novel. Many of the indigenous peoples they encounter in the Pacific islands have endured similar experiences, with foreign forces subjecting them to occupation, torture, and death. Notwithstanding the external forces that try to alienate these people from their homelands, Ned feels tied to Dinetah, his place of origin, just as the indigenous people with whom he speaks overseas also love their homelands.
In addition to exile and alienation, the novel also focuses on the value and sacredness of Navajo culture. Ned’s uncle advises him to view assimilation as a tool to ensure the survival of this culture, which Ned takes to heart, successfully adapting to life at the boarding school while continuing to honor Navajo traditions and speak his native language in secret. This is the novel’s great thematic irony: The US government beat children for speaking Navajo and denied any Navajo who tried to enlist, only to actively recruit Indigenous American soldiers fluent in English and Navajo when the latter proves integral to the war effort. Ultimately, it is Navajo voices that hold the US war effort together:
Even when our voices grew hoarse, we did not stop. Our Navajo nets kept everything connected like a spider’s strands spanning distant branches. The winds of battle never broke our web. As the battle for Iwo Jima raged all around us, our voices held it together (187).
Immediately after the war, Navajo veterans return home to further alienation and discrimination, despite their vital service to the country. Ned again finds solace in his people’s rituals, traditions, and language, as he did during the war. The novel’s conclusion, in which Ned uses his GI Bill benefits to become a teacher, brings this theme full circle, as Ned once again uses a system of the US government to help preserve his culture.
The Navajo as Underdogs
The novel consistently depicts the Navajo as outsiders who are “othered” by the dominant white culture in America, positioning them as underdogs throughout the text. Ned himself is also an underdog: He repeatedly describes how he is small for his age, never growing much over five feet tall. However, his small stature does not prevent him achieving success, and Ned asserts, “Even though my body would not grow tall, somehow I knew there was no limit to the growth of my mind” (29). True enough, we see him succeed in most everything he attempts, doing well in school and then being accepted as a code talker and excelling in that role.
In a way Ned represents the Navajo people’s position in America. Historically maligned, oppressed, and marginalized, the Navajo are presented as underdogs in the fight to preserve their culture from dispossession and assimilation. And just as Ned succeeds in a system stacked against him, the Navajo continue to endure, finding ways to turn assimilation into a tool of cultural preservation and providing a crucial service in the form of code-talking during the war. When Ned becomes an educator who teaches children about the Navajo language, this symbolizes hope that the culture will continue to prevail.
Similarly, Navajo servicemembers on the whole seem to surprise their non-Navajo counterparts during the war. Though they face discrimination at home and abroad, they’re resourceful and strong, and in many instances they fare better than the white soldiers they serve with. When all the recruits are cast as underdogs in boot camp, Ned notes that Navajos excel because they’re accustomed to such treatment: “Being Indians, we were used to having white men shout at us and tell us we were worthless and stupid” (61). He later speculates that Navajo Marines are tougher and more determined than their white counterparts “because we remembered the suffering and courage of our grandfathers who fought as warriors to protect our land and our people” (69).
The Navajo Marines also implement their agrarian and hunting skills in foreign environments, such as when they successfully complete the two-day training exercise in the desert because they are familiar with the water reservoir inside prickly pear cacti—while the white troops collapse and must call for aid. Later, during combat, they are able to use their Navajo rituals to maintain emotional and mental balance during stressful missions. The hardships they have faced in their lives, and the heritage that marks them as underdogs back home, have all prepared them for the trials of military service.
Empathy During Wartime
Once Ned is enlisted and sent to the front lines, Code Talker consistently emphasizes the human cost of war. It is most clearly demonstrated through Ned’s worldview, as his humanist perspective affirms the value of human beings regardless of their nationality. He relates the chaos and violence of combat during World War Two, tallying American victories and challenges without losing sight of the individuals fighting in and affected by the war.
Ned is initially unsettled by how the enemy is “faceless,” but he’s later confronted with the enemy’s humanity. He’s jarred upon witnessing his first dead body even as other soldiers continue to press on, and he’s struck by the reality that these enemies are just men, “not monsters at all” but “just human beings” (97). The text further highlights the human toll of war by drawing parallels between the Navajo and the Japanese, which has the effect of humanizing Japanese soldiers and civilians alike. Ned sees traces of his cousin in the face of a dead Japanese soldier, and two fellow code talkers remark that the Japanese survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “looked so Indian that they might have been Navajos. […] it was hard to look at those people and think of them as our enemies” (207).
The novel also touches upon the civilians caught in the crossfire of war when Ned is sent to Guam. There he encounters and keenly identifies with the indigenous Chamorro people, who have been tortured, murdered, and imprisoned by the Japanese. Their plight reminds Ned of “what had been done to our Navajo people during the time of the Long Walk. I wanted to weep for them. It was just as bad for the Chamorros as it had been for us Indians” (154). By drawing this parallel, the text personalizes the war for Ned and the reader.
The novel does not extol the valor of the US military; instead, it weaves a complex narrative that explores how war affects individual human beings. In relating to oppressed peoples whether they are civilians or enemies, Ned asks the reader to consider multiple angles of the conflict. Rather than ticking off wins and losses, tallying nameless bodies, and categorizing forces as either heroes or villains, he elevates the individuals at the center of this conflict, those who bear the cost of war with lost lives, livelihoods, cultures, and histories.
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