Perseverance In Code Talker

Code Talkers The novel Code Talker is an account of a Navajo Code Talker and his struggles through childhood and WWII. The novel opens with a young Kii Ya’zhi, latter know as Ned Begay, being sent off to the white mission school. Throughout school Ned is forbidden to speak his native Navajo language. Later in the book Ned joins WWII as a U.S. Marine. He then becomes a Code Talker. Throughout the novel Code Talker, the author, Joseph Bruchac, presents a theme of perseverance, as Ned goes through mission school and eventually WWII. Throughout the story Ned is constantly being told not to speak his own native language of Navajo. During his childhood, his teachers and many other white adults said, “It was no good to speak Navajo or be Navajo. Everything about us that was Indian had to be forgotten.”(Burchac 18) As Ned progressed in his life he was constantly being told that what he was doing was wrong. Ned was an extremely bright student in school

He was seen as wanted and needed in the Marines, because he was in order to send coded messages to the allied forces. Ned explains, “For so many years I had been in schools where I was told never to speak our sacred language. I had to listen to the words of bilaga’anaa teachers who had no respect at all for our old ways, and who told us that the best thing we could do would be to forget everything that made us Navajos. Now practically overnight, that had all changed.”(Burchac 81) As Ned explains, for the Navajos they were told to stop being Navajo, but now as they become Code Talkers that all changes. Through the course of the novel, the main character Ned, is being told that he is a bad and awful person just because he is Navajo. This all changes however as when he enters the marines. In Joseph Bruchac’s novel Code Talker, he gives the audience a theme of steadfastness as the main character Ned goes through life as a