Interview with Zonnie Gorman:
Hero's Daughter Discusses Navajo Code Talker Legacy

Welcome to the Arizona State Museum podcasts. Today we bring you a podcast originally produced by the University of Arizona's UA News on our current exhibition called “Our Fathers, Our Grandfathers, Our Heroes… the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II”.

This is PodCats from the University of Arizona. Our Jeff Harrison has this week's report on a new exhibit at the U of A's Arizona State Museum.

One of the enduring stories of the Second World War is the role played by some four hundred twenty young Navajos in the Pacific theater. The group formed the US Marine Corps’ Navajo Code Talkers. The young Marines encrypted messages in Diné, their native language, and transmitted them to one another all across the Pacific. The system proved so secure that Japanese cryptanalysts were never able to break the code. A traveling exhibit documenting these men and what they did is currently at the Arizona State Museum and runs through August 15 [2009]. The exhibit features a history of the Code Talkers through text and photos and other artifacts from the war. Zonnie Gorman is the program coordinator for the exhibit. She is also the daughter of Carl Gorman, a noted artist and educator who was a part of this elite group. Gorman says the exhibit began as a project by Navajo students at Ft. Wingate High School near Gallup, New Mexico who were trying to learn more about their ancestors.

It was a few questions that fascinated the kids that, I guess as an adult, I’d never thought about. One for example, these were Navajo language students—junior and senior Navajo language students—we were working with. And they made the connection and felt an affinity to the fact that they were sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids and that these men were sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids during the war.

One question they had, had to do with the fact that while the young man who became Code Talkers were fluent in their native language they were unable to read or write it.

And for them to take their language and take a foreign alphabet, the English alphabet, and have to phonetically spell out their native language in order to make up the code really fascinated these kids. So they incorporated that into the exhibit. When you go look at the code, you'll see the word that the Marine Corps gave them to translate to code, the word that they used in Navajo that they coded in the phonetic spelling, the supposed translation—some of them are not literally translated correctly. And then the kids themselves sat down and wrote the words how they would write them today with the high tones and the different marks that we use today in our language.

Gorman says while the exploits of the Code Talkers has been known for some time it is difficult for non-Indians to grasp the significance, the stature that these men hold in their own culture.

These men are truly heroes. They’re national heroes. but for the Native American communities, and particularly the Navajo people, they are made up of legend. Or they will be. If this had happened five hundred years ago these men would be incorporated into our legends. So, keep in mind that it is a student exhibit because it is a very professional looking exhibit. But to know that it was students that put this together and then the tremendous amount of pride that they had in these men I think is very poignant.

It's worth noting that other Indian groups were brought into World War II for their language skills, especially by the US Army; but nothing in size and scope like the Navajos. Gorman says their story offers endless fascination for Indians and non-Indians alike.

And I hope that the exhibit gives them a better understanding of where these men came from. The social and economic conditions that they were living under, the US policies of assimilation that they were subject to.  I think this show is a deeper explanation of some of these things to people that are not aware of that history.

The exhibit: Our Fathers, Our Grandfathers, Our Heroes runs through mid-August [2009] at the Arizona State Museum on the U of A campus. You can find out more about it on their website at statemuseum.arizona.edu or go through our site, uanews.org. PodCats is a production of the Office of University Communications at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Thanks for joining us, I’m Johnny Cruz.

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