Not the Navaho Code Talkers

Really? Give me a break.

VOL. 3 ... No. 98. March 19, 2025.

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Howdy Humpers,

As you know, a big part of my mission with the HDG is to make you laugh, or at least smile. This column used to be funny and I hope it will be again, but my friends, I am not feeling it. I’m having an existential crisis. The sun is shining. There are people in this world who love me and whom I love. I have enough to eat, but things are not normal. Are you feeling it too?

I miss civility. I miss refinement, diplomacy, kindness. I miss manners in official government activities. Instead we’ve got a World Federation Wrestling smackdown playing out on a world stage in primetime.

My view of America has been that we are a flawed country with many missteps and cruelties littered throughout our history, but we are good people trying to evolve up to the ideals outlined in our Declaration of Independence. I memorized this in fourth or fifth grade and I still know it:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

My teachers explained to me that “men” meant women too. That should have told me something, but I believed we were founded on a noble idea that would eventually include everyone. I believed our system of government was so strong that it could not be broken. In fact, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to destroy it. Shake it up. Yes. Protest. Change the laws. Yes. But, destroy the foundation? Never.

I thought we had a shared vision as a people. That was the mindset as I came of age in the 1960s. Corny as it may sound today, the American dream of a middle-class life, education, and home ownership was alive and well. Even the most marginalized people — African Americans, Native Americans, LGBTQ+, and women — were beginning to make headway towards participating more fully in that dream.

But I didn’t take into consideration the depth of racism, anti-semitism, greed, homophobia, and sexism embedded in the American psyche. I feel like I am living in a different country now. Under the guise of eliminating any kind of “advantage” by removing references to DEI and LGBTQ+ language on official government websites, the names of actual human beings are being removed from our official history in real time. As we watch!

How odd is that? Do you feel like up is down and down is up? Have we all swallowed some potion that distorts reality? Perhaps the men in charge and their loyal cronies will go down like Joseph McCarthy, an aberration who did damage in his day, but became a mere footnote in history. I hope so.

With all the expunging going on from official government websites, for some reason, removing references to the Navaho Code Talkers of World War II seems especially egregious.

According to the Washington Post, “Until recently, a page on the Defense Department’s website celebrated Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the six Marines photographed hoisting a U.S. flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, as an emblem of the “contributions and sacrifices Native Americans have made to the United States, not just in the military, but in all walks of life . . . ”

But the page, along with many others about Native American and other minority service members, has now been erased

Photo from Washington Post online. Joe Rosenthal/AP

Indigenous people of the U.S. were brutalized almost to extinction by our government and the Catholic church. This just adds another checkmark on the list of sins against them. According to Heather Cox Richardson in her excellent newsletter, Letters From An American:

From 1942 to 1945, the Code Talkers were key to every major operation of the Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. The Code Talkers were Indigenous Americans who used codes based in their native languages to transmit messages that the Axis Powers never cracked. The Army recognized the ability of tribal members to send coded language in World War I and realized the codes could not be easily interpreted in part because many Indigenous languages had never been written down.

Indigenous Americans always enlisted in the military in higher proportions than any other demographic group—in World War II, more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between 19 and 50 joined the service—and the participation of the Code Talkers was key to the invasion of Iwo Jima, for example, when they sent more than 800 messages without error.

“Were it not for the Navajos,” Major Howard Connor said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

The Code Talkers weren’t brought into the war under some diversity, equity, inclusion “DEI advantage” to give them something they didn’t deserve. They were recruited by the government precisely because of their cultural customs and strengths. They were recruited because of their brilliance and patriotism. They were recruited because they could be counted on to serve their country with honor.

I believe my motto:

So, maybe this week you can make me laugh. Send me a joke. Tell me a funny story.

Save my life.

I’ll be funny next week.

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Until next time, my friends . . . Get outside. Feel the sunshine on your beautiful faces. Dance to the rhythm of your extraordinary lives!

Janna

Quote of the Week:

My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades. ― Guess Who.