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True Whisperers: The Story of The Navajo Code Talkers (2007)
Produced by Valerie Red-Horse and Gale Anne Hurd
Distributed by PBS Home Video
www.pbs.org
60 minutes
During the war, the Japanese were highly adept at breaking Allied code, resulting in devastating losses. Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary serving on the Navajo reservation, approached the United States military with the idea of creating a code based on the Navajo language, and soon, a plan for the code was conceived. True Whisperers relates the story of those Navajos who, during World War II, answered their country's call, despite the longstanding troubled relationship between the government and the Indian nations. For the first time in generations, or perhaps, ever, the Navajo language was needed, and the Navajos, themselves, were needed. The irony of this call to duty is that the young boys whose language skills would prove invaluable were enrolled in Indian boarding schools that forbid them from speaking Navajo under threat of painful physical punishment. While telling the story of these Navajo Code Talkers, the film also does much to relate the concurrent marginalization of the Navajo culture in the wider national sphere.
True Whisperers opens to a desert landscape, the ancestral home of the Navajo for thousands of years. Throughout the film, the Navajo Code Talkers speak of their connection to this land -Mother Earth - and the "sacred mountains" rising from it. Code Talker Thomas Begay describes how, as a boy, he was awakened pre-dawn to herd sheep - he was living the traditional Navajo life and "Life was good" - until the day when government officials took him from his family and placed him in a notorious culture-killing boarding school....