Code Talker

by Chester Nez

  I knew English was a language that involved reading and writing. Not like Navajo. The Navajo word for school meant both “to count” and “to read.” I liked the idea of learning to read and write. That desire drew me toward the mysterious concept of school. I decided I had to at least give it a fair shot.

  The day came. We left in the month of “Small Wind”—October—that year. Dora and I climbed into the back of the local missionary’s Model T Ford truck. The missionary had agreed to drive us to kindergarten in Tohatchi, New Mexico. I scooted over close to my little sister in the truck bed, making room for several other children. Their shoulders pressed against mine. I sensed their fear.

  Piñons and junipers whipped by. I heard my sister murmur softly, “Dora.”

  The missionary had just assigned us “English” names.

  I smiled at Dora. “Chesssster,” I said, the sibilance of the unfamiliar name hissing between my teeth.

  We arrived at the Tohatchi boarding school well after midnight. The school, made of rough stone, nestled into the foothills of the Chuska Mountains. There were four dormitories, one for the older boys, one for the older girls, and one each for the younger boys and girls. The school was a single large building. The dark hid the shabbiness of the school that first night.

  Instead of using the name of our clan, the missionary told the school administrators that “Nez” was Dora’s and my last name. Nez meant “very long” or “very tall” in Navajo. It came from Father, D’ent Nez, who was a very tall man. D’ent meant “the man,” so D’ent Nez meant “the tall man.” The name had been given to him when he registered on the reservation.

  It was odd that the school preferred to use Father’s name, not the familiar maternal clan names used by us Navajos.

  We were fed milk and one thick cracker, about the size of a small woman’s palm. Not much of a meal after the daylong journey. I yearned for some mutton or tortillas, or for corn cooked over the campfire.

  “I’m still hungry,” I said, pushing my empty plate away.

  Dora quickly swallowed the last of her cracker.

  “Time for bed.” The matron, speaking English, pulled me by the arm.

  We received no more food that night.

  And the food got no better and no more plentiful. Dora and I ate every scrap on our plates, licking our fingers and pressing them onto stray crumbs to pick them up. We arrived at each meal hungry, and left still hungry. We looked for food in the trash pile out back of the school, sometimes finding crumbs or things like spoiled fruit. We wolfed anything that was remotely edible, spoiled or not. Both of us were slim when we arrived at school, but we grew skinny. We felt hungry, always. And we missed our family.

  The lack of food took its toll. When Dora and I went home for a visit, we told older brother Coolidge about how hungry we were. One look at our skinny frames and sunken cheeks told our brother and the rest of our family that we weren’t getting enough to eat.

  “You’re not going back there.” Coolidge’s eyes flashed. “You’ll come to Fort Defiance with me.”

  Grandmother and Father agreed, and we two youngest Nez children returned with Coolidge to the all-Navajo school in Fort Defiance, Arizona.

  En route to Fort Defiance, we again bumped along in the missionary’s Model T truck. Deeply rutted wagon and horse trails served as roads. I gripped a flour sack tightly in one fist. There was no place to stop for food along the route, so we carried lunch in the sack—fried bread, some mutton, tortillas. I wondered whether it would be the last good food we ate before finishing out the year at boarding school.

  The missionary stopped his truck. “Time for a break.”

  He gave each of us a few sips of water from a canvas water bag that hung over the grille of the vehicle.

  Dora looked at me with round eyes. The air-cooled drinking water was thrillingly cold, almost like ice water.

  “I hope the food will be better at this school,” I said quietly.

  Dora nodded.

  We climbed back into the truck. Is it the right thing, going off to another school? Uncertainties chased around in my brain, but I knew that Father and Grandmother expected me to do my best.

  Around midnight, we arrived at Fort Defiance. Cloaked in dark, the dormitories and school building loomed foreign, forbidding. Dora gripped my arm.

  I smiled down at her. “It will be okay.” My doubts had given way to a calm determination to succeed in this alien place.

  Colonel Sumner, a Union commander in the Civil War, had built Fort Defiance in the early 1850s. The outpost was designed as a stronghold for United States soldiers stationed in the western territories. From Fort Defiance they were ordered to quash Navajo uprisings. It was at Fort Defiance that Kit Carson gathered the Diné for one of the darkest episodes in their history, the Long Walk to Fort Sumner.

  Years later it became a government school for Navajo children, one designed to rid them of the “burden” of their culture and traditions.

  Looking back from today’s perspective, many former students feel the fort was a bad place for a school. They had bad dreams because of the many deaths and the bodies buried there.

  On my first day at school, I lined up with the other boys. Tears streamed down many faces. The first order of business: a mandatory haircut.

  Hair fell in piles. I awaited my turn, hands squeezed into fists as I watched the shearing. I figured there must be some mistake. We Navajos believe in witchcraft. Cut hair and fingernail clippings should be gathered and hidden or burned. Such things could be used to invoke bad medicine against their owner. People should not leave parts of themselves scattered around to be picked up by someone else. Even the smallest children knew that.

  I looked around. Stern people herded boys into the shearing room. They spoke only English, and I spoke only Navajo. How could I make them understand?

  Hair continued to fall, the strands all mingling together. My hair was shoulder length, black as a raven’s wing. I was pushed toward the chair, and I climbed up, gritted my teeth, and closed my eyes as the barber worked. When I opened them I was shaved nearly bald. Not even the best of medicine men could separate my hair from the black piles growing around me.

  Dour Indian matrons—non-Navajos, but still Indian—watched. Their hawklike eyes stabbed fear into the heart of any child who contemplated protest. I shuddered, looked around at all the baldy kids. What will happen now? Who could guess at the consequences of this total disregard for safe hygiene?

  Each child was treated for lice. Then medical exams were performed. The doctor poked and prodded at us as though we were sheep.

  The school issued uniforms—one-piece, navy-blue suits that buttoned or zipped up the front. I had brought my own clothes with me, but the matrons confiscated them. This, too, worried me. Like any personal object, clothes could be used in a manner similar to hair, as a device for placing a curse on someone.

  I looked down at the new uniform. I didn’t feel like myself. I looked around at the others. Everyone looked the same. A little boy near me struggled to fasten the unfamiliar uniform buttons. I bent down and helped him.

  “Like that,” I said in Navajo. “Now you try the others.”

  “Quiet! English only!” The dark eyes of a matron bored into me. “English, or you’ll be punished.”

  I wonder what she said?

  When the little boy still couldn’t fasten his buttons, I did it for him. “You can practice later.” I whispered the words, guessing that maybe my speaking had angered the matron.

  We new arrivals were given a tour of the school. Four red-brick dormitories, placed in a square, housed the students. One of the buildings was three stories high. That one, a beautiful building, sheltered the older girls. The other three dormitories—one each for the older boys, the younger boys, and the younger girls—rose to only two stories. But they all looked huge to us kids who’d been raised in hogans and summerhouses.

  The cafeteria sat across a sidewalk from the dormitories, and a short way
down the sidewalk was the school. Government employees shared the large, two-story school building. A smaller school, farther down the sidewalk, provided classes for the youngest children.

  A trading post, located off school property, but near the edge of the campus, sold candy and toys. And the fields around the school were cultivated with vegetables. These were harvested, and they became ingredients in our meals.

  Boys were told not to speak to the girls. Students were allowed to enter some areas, like the living areas and classrooms. Other sections of the campus were out of bounds, and our guide—using hand gestures and helped by an older student who translated the warnings into Navajo—warned us to stay away.

  At home I had gone everywhere and spoken to everyone. It seemed odd that at school, certain places were forbidden and speaking to the girls was prohibited.

  We boys climbed up to our dormitory room on the second floor of the boys’ residence hall. I looked down the long row of beds, all arranged side by side. I had never slept in a “white person’s” bed, except at school in Tohatchi. Windows covered one entire wall of the dormitory. It was a long drop to the ground from where I stood.

  That first night, the boy in the bed next to me woke in the middle of the night screaming.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him in Navajo.

  The little boy shivered, although the night was warm. “Terrible dreams,” he told me. “Dead men. Indian warriors. And white men, too.”

  An owl—always a bad omen—perched on a lamppost outside the dormitory. Eerie hoots stirred the still night. We two boys looked at each other, eyes popping. Then we lay back in bed, looking straight up at the ceiling, trying not to move.

  The next night, as I climbed into bed, the spirits of dead warriors stood vivid in my imagination. I lay awake, not daring to close my eyes.

  Many children had bad dreams in this strange place that had once been a frontier fort, a place of death. The boys in my dormitory were all ten years old or younger. I hated to see them cry. Several other boys and I tried to calm their fears.

  I wished my brother Coolidge slept in the next bed. But the older male students had been divided into two groups, eleven through eighteen and over eighteen. They lived in a different building. Like me, most of the other Navajo children had begun school at the age of seven or older. Some were even eleven or twelve. So there were quite a few boys over the age of eighteen, even though Fort Defiance School stopped at sixth grade. Still, there were no older boys in my dorm and no adults to comfort us children after our nightmares.

  Older boys. At home I knew which kids were older by the way they looked, how tall they were, and how strong. Time, back home, was marked by the change of seasons, not by a calendar. I, like most of the children, had not known my birthday or my age. The school obtained birth dates from the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Crown-point, in northwestern New Mexico. I learned, at age eight, that I was born on January 23, 1921.

  I brushed one hand over my hair, feeling the unfamiliar bristles. I had been at Fort Defiance School for several days. I did my best not to do anything wrong, but since I knew no English, it was difficult to figure out the rules.

  I addressed a boy, using his Navajo name.

  The matron struck me on the back of the head with her open palm. “English only.”

  “Wood, uh . . . Wood,” the little boy whispered to me, pointing at his own chest with his thumb.

  “Woodrow,” snapped the matron, giving the boy a shove.

  The “English” names assigned by the school were made from sounds unfamiliar to us children. Luckily, I had the already familiar name the missionary had given to me. Other kids had a more difficult time with the foreign words that felt wrong in their mouths. But these were now their names. When asked for their new names by a teacher or matron, they struggled to remember. Punishment was immediate for those who forgot.

  The half-Laguna matron gestured and spoke to a man dressed in dark-colored overalls. He carried a flat-shaped metal box and wore a belt with various tools hanging out of it. The matron’s voice grew hard, and she pointed in the direction of the bathrooms. This matron was half white. The other woman who watched over the young boys in my section of the school was full-blooded Pima. I couldn’t decide which one I feared and disliked most.

  The kids passing the Laguna-and-white matron gave her and the tool man a wide berth. Still, one stepped too close, and she grabbed him—quick as a snake—by the back of his uniform.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I froze in place, watching the exchange.

  The boy looked down at the floor. “Uh, uh . . . Theo . . .”

  “Theodore, you idiot.” The matron swatted him across the face. “Theodore.” She pushed the boy away.

  Gulping down tears, he scurried down the hall after his classmates.

  She turned to me. “What are you looking at?”

  I yelled, “Chester,” at the top of my voice, then whipped around and followed the others before she could grab me. She always picks on the littlest ones, I thought.

  The knowledge of constant danger sat lodged in the pit of my stomach like a rock. I tried my best to answer questions correctly, but never knew when a matron would strike. They watched, their dark cold eyes waiting for us to make a mistake, to do something wrong. I was always afraid.

  Snow fell softly outside the dormitory windows. Loud whispering came from two beds away. Navajo. I’d been caught speaking Navajo three days before. The Pima matron brushed my teeth with brown Fels-Naptha soap. I still couldn’t taste food, only the acrid, bitter taste of the lye soap.

  Teachers at the school were encouraged to be strict, and the smaller children were frequently targeted by slaps or kicks. But the lingering taste of the soap was worse than either of those punishments.

  “Why do you think the matrons are so mean?” the small, high voice, speaking in Navajo, asked from a bed to my right.

  “The teachers are mean, too,” said someone on my other side. “And we’ll be sent home if we complain.”

  “I’d like to go home,” another voice said.

  “It isn’t right, though. They’re really mean,” said a fourth voice in the dark.

  I thought about how well I’d been treated at home by my father and grandparents. They never hit me when I was bad. They explained to me that what I was doing was wrong, and said that I should stop. It didn’t seem right that the matrons—Indians themselves, although not Navajos—mistreated us, their fellow Indians.

  With the snow growing deeper outside, I remembered the “string game,” played with my aunties and brothers. The string game honored Spider Woman, who taught the Diné to weave. Complex patterns formed when string was “woven” back and forth between our fingers. As the string was carefully passed from one participant to another, the patterns grew more elaborate. The game was played only in winter, just as hunting stories were told only in winter.

  I wrapped up in my blanket. I thought about autumn in Chichiltah, a golden time, my favorite, when corn was harvested. At the end of a long day, Father often made a kind of basket of barbed wire, filled it with corn, and roasted it over the fire. Lying on that cot at Fort Defiance, I almost tasted the sweetness of the yellow kernels.

  When I concentrated, I heard the soft chime of sheep bells. After the long winter, in early spring, they returned the sheep to Grandma’s shelter and corralled them to be sheared. It was then that their wool was the fullest, and as the weather warmed, the sheep wouldn’t need a thick coat.

  We tied the sheep so they wouldn’t move and get cut, then used manual shears, starting at the shoulders, and tried to get the wool off all in one piece. Grandma and my aunties then pulled any twigs and debris from the wool and sprinkled it with white clay sand. They let it dry for at least a week, because it contained oils that would make it difficult to work with. Next they carded the wool, using two flat paddles with metal spikes. These were worked against each other, kind of like combs, and the wool was p
ulled so the fibers all ran in one direction. That was hard physical labor. Next the carded wool was spun into yarn using a spindle, which is a wooden stick with a flat disk near the bottom. The spindle was twirled in one hand, and the carded wool was fed onto the spindle with the other hand. The fibers stuck together, making yarn. The disk at the bottom kept the winding wool from falling off the spindle.

  Washing with yucca suds came next, then drying, then dyeing. With dyes made from plants, the wool had to be dipped many times to get a good color. With commercial colors, which were available from the trading post, one application was enough. Some wool was dyed red, some black, some brown. Combining those colors with undyed white wool, the women designed and wove rugs with wonderful patterns.

  The looms were made from four sticks, two vertical and two horizontal. The coarsest wool was used to make the vertical strands for the rug or blanket, and finer wool was used to make the design. They used a big wooden comb to pack the horizontal wool down, giving the end product a tight weave. Auntie and Grandma kept busy with the task all winter.

  Great-Grandmother had been an especially fine weaver. The trading post owner judged the quality of the rugs with an expert eye. He traded goods the family needed, like coffee, flour, or salt, for rugs. He trusted his customers, and gave products on credit, keeping a ledger of what was owed. When my family didn’t need any products from the trader immediately, he exchanged woven goods for aluminum coins, or “chips,” in twenty-five-cent, fifty-cent, and dollar denominations. These were stamped with the name of the trading post. My family used the post “money” when they needed it—for rope or sugar, candy or saltines, or dozens of other things the trader sold.

  Under the cover, I pressed a cold foot against my leg for warmth. At home, I had warm clothes that Grandma and my aunties made for me. From big squares of sheepskin they made shoes, folding the fur on the inside and wrapping it around my feet, securing it with twine. My winter pants and shirt were also sheepskin. Wet sheepskin, beaten with rocks and rubbed with sticks, grew soft. Then, as with the water bag, animal grease applied to the leather side of the skin made it water-repellent. The cozy clothing had thick, warm wool on the inside.