The Language That Won the War and the Veteran That Lead an Oppressed Reservation to a Self-Determined Nation

The Language That Won The War And The Veteran That Lead An Oppressed Reservation To A Self-Determined Nation A. Engelstad Peter MacDonald, Sr. February 22, 2010 Table of Contents Inerviewer/Interviewee Release Form………………..…………………………………………...2 Statement of Purpose……………………………………………………………………………...3 Biography…………………………………………………………………………………………4 Historical Contextualization—“The Evolution of Native Americans from WWII to the 1990s”..6 Interview Transcription…………………………………………………………………………..24 Time Indexing Recording Log…………………………………………………………………...57 Interview Analysis…………………………………………………………………………….....59 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………....66 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...80 Statement of Purpose The purpose of this oral history document is to achieve a better understanding of the experiences of Native Americans, especially the Navajo people, including their experiences in WWII as code-talkers and their experiences with the United States government since then. The document provides a historical contextualization of primary and secondary sources documenting the occurrences and historiography on the topic and compares these to an in-depth interview with Peter MacDonald, a Navajo code-talker himself and the former Chairman of Navajo Nation from 1970-1989. Furthermore, the project analyzes the effectiveness of oral history as an accurate way to study the past. Biography Peter MacDonald Sr. was probably born in the early spring of 1928. Because he was raised in the traditional way of the Navajo, the largest Native American tribe in the United States, he does not know the exact date of his birth. He was raised in Teec Nos Pos, New Mexico, by his mother and his grandparents, having lost his father at age two. He began his formal education at age six in a BIA day school, one of many set up by the federal government and Bureau of Indian Affairs to offer Native American children a primary and secondary education more typical of schooling outside the reservation. On his first day at the BIA school, he was given the name „Peter Donald‟ to replace the Navajo name his parents had given him. Within his first week at school, he became Peter MacDonald after the other children learned the song “Old McDonald.” After finishing at the BIA day school in second grade, MacDonald graduated to attend a BIA boarding school where children were punished for speaking English and for refusing to abandon their traditional practices and culture. MacDonald dropped out of the BIA school after sixth grade to return home and be trained as a medicine man by his grandfather. After seeing other men from the reservation leave to find paying jobs elsewhere, MacDonald, 15, followed and found work. In 1944, he was drafted into the Marine Corps at fifteen years old and trained as a Navajo Code-Talker. He sailed with other Marines to Hawaii where he waited to be deployed. But, after missing the ship to Guam, he was not deployed from Hawaii until the end of the war when he served in the south pacific and north China with the 6th Marine Division. He was honorably discharged from the Marines in 1946 with the rank of corporal. After the war, MacDonald returned to school, first attending Bacone Junior College and then the University of Oklahoma where he studied electrical engineering and graduated to become a member of the Polaris Missile design team. After his work with Polaris, Peter MacDonald returned to Navajo Nation to start and lead the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity. Developing programs encouraging self-determination among the Navajo. After resigning from the ONEO, MacDonald ran for tribal chairman, the only elected position in the Navajo tribal government. As chairman, MacDonald led the movement toward self-determination for the Navajo, and MacDonald pushed for a senate investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their shortcomings in helping with the movement for self- determination. In response, MacDonald‟s purchase of the Big Boquillas Ranch was investigated by the Senate, resulting in MacDonald being sentenced to years in prison until eventually being pardoned by President Clinton in 1999. Historical Contextualization: The Evolution of Native Americans from World War II to the 1990s In 1948, during his second year at Bacone College, a Baptist college originally founded as a missionary school for Cherokee students, Peter MacDonald was asked to deliver a speech at the Southern Baptist convention to encourage continual support for the school: A long time ago, we Native Americans lived on this continent with everything provided for us—the Mother Earth, the Father Sky—and everything put on earth for our use…Then along came the white men. They didn‟t have anything, so we helped them by teaching them about…surviving in what, to them, was a strange land. Then, in return, the whites gave us tuberculosis… They brought us war to protect…everything we had. The white men came. Now we‟re out here, no longer a happy people. We‟re out here like hungry wolves on the prairie… Now that we‟re on the prairie like lonely, hungry wolves, we need education. We need to speak and write like you. We need the religious education that you provide for us at Bacone. (MacDonald 94) MacDonald‟s words reflect a feeling shared by many Native Americans of the time period. He and others his age came from a generation that would be the last to have a chance to experience the old traditions of their culture, uncontaminated by white ways. However, after the involvement of Native Americans in WWII, it was clear that the traditions of their ancestors, and perhaps the desire to participate in these traditions, were taken from the young Marines, who answered Uncle Sam‟s call to duty by creating a code derived, not from their education in the Christian schools they were forced to attend, but from the language of their ancestors which had almost been forgotten. However, as a consequence of their heroic efforts during the war, the veterans had seen life beyond the impoverished reservations and scientific fact that contradicted the nature of their religious beliefs. These veterans could not ignore what they had seen and from here a new era of Native American culture, an era dominated by whites through education and government, evolved. Therefore, in order to understand the evolution of Native Americans from World War II to the 1990s, it is important to understand the experiences of these veterans and the life on the reservations during their deployment and upon their return, as well as gain a first-hand perspective of someone who was there and led his people in the years afterward. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Native Americans responded quickly. The Navajo, the largest Native American tribe in the country, were facing extremely hard economic times. After the Long Walk in 1846, a relocation of the Navajo from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner, New Mexico to “exterminate the Navajos…covering 300 miles in the snow to a concentration camp in the dead of winter” (Eastlake 2), the Navajos lost 9/10 of the 30 million acres they considered their land. Arizona State University professor, Peter Iverson, recounts that it was not the terrible treatment of the Navajo that was the worst aspect of the Long Walk, but the trauma of being taken from their sacred land, “You have to remember that the people did not know whether they would be able ever to return and they had been brought up to believe that they must live within the boundaries of these sacred mountains” (Navajo Code Talkers). Two decades later, the Navajo were granted the right to leave this confined area and a larger territory was mapped out for the Navajo in a treaty of 18681 (MacDonald 36). However, these maps meant nothing to the Navajos, who had never learned to read maps, and they returned to the land of their ancestors which they considered sacred and theirs by natural right. Because this land was not desirable to white settlers, they rarely noticed that the Navajo had expanded past their 1 1868 Treaty: See Appendix 2 mapped out area. When notice was taken, a representative from the tribe would request the land from the government and, because no one wanted it, it was usually granted to them. In the 1920s however, the government saw inhabitance of the land outside the Navajo‟s restrictions growing. The government set formal boundaries out of which the Navajo‟s could not live and implemented livestock reduction, commanding that each Navajo family reduce their livestock to almost a fourth of what they originally had. By 1934, Navajo Nation was confined to 17 million acres, about half the amount of land the Navajo had before the Long Walk, and after the reduction of their livestock and source of wealth, the land was poverty stricken (MacDonald 37). Some to defend the land of their ancestors and some to escape the hardships at home, many Native Americans enlisted for war or went to work at the numerous jobs the war was providing, all leaving the reservation and their distinctive culture for the first time. Navajo WWII veteran Sam Billison was motivated to enlist in the war because the Japanese atrocities reminded him of atrocities committed against his ancestors by the white men, “When I read about Asia, the Japanese occupation, Eastern Asia where they were raping children…killing practically everybody. It reminded me of the Long Walk” (Navajo Code Talkers). Keith Little, also a veteran, had a very patriotic response to Pearl Harbor, “being a Native American has a lot to do with protecting your country… you were told that this is your land, this is what you have here. And you protect that” (Navajo Code Talkers). Some Native Americans unknowingly registered for the draft when they sought jobs outside the reservation and were registered by authorities at the job sites.

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