Free Code Talker by Chester Nez

peers. Father would never do such a thing. The other students sat unmoving, knowing their turn at punishment would come soon enough.
    â€œGo back to your seat, and pay attention,” the teacher said.
    None of the teachers spoke Navajo, and paying attention to the meaningless English was not easy. We’d been warned not to speak to the other children during meals or in class, so we couldn’t help each other out with the teacher’s questions. Even during free time, in the dormitory or outdoors, English was the only language allowed. Since almost none of the new students knew English, this was an impossible mandate.
    In class, if a child dared, he raised his hand for permission to go to the bathroom. Of course, he had to ask in English, so most tried to hold it until after class. We weren’t allowed to fidget or to look around at each other. Eyes stared straight ahead. Feet were planted firmly on the floor. Hands and heads remained motionless.
    But in order to avoid being hit, we had to learn. Eventually we students began to get the gist—if not the finer meaning—of what was said. And one thing became alarmingly clear: the school planned to erase everything we’d been taught at home.
    After the last class of the day, I was ready to vent some pent-up energy. We returned to the dormitory to play inside. We had no indoor toys, so we invented games or played things like hide-and-seek.
    Then we marched to a supper of rice or corned beef with cabbage grown on the school’s farmland. After eating and escaping the older kids at the cafeteria, we younger boys returned to our dorm. Bedtime was seven-thirty or eight o’clock.
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    It was a glorious, sunny Saturday. I had made lots of friends my age at school. We all gathered in a group.
    After we tired of hide-and-seek, we meandered in a cluster to the trading post. It was down the sidewalk from the small kids’ school, just outside the Fort Defiance grounds. We boys had a few coins from doing odd jobs. The same two-story building that housed the older children’s school also provided office space for a host of government workers. Coal furnaces heated the building. The other boys and I broke up coal and received ten cents per bucket. Government workers also hired students to chop wood, and when the plumbing broke, we were paid to haul quantities of water to the offices.
    At the trading post, Robert Walley and I bought marbles with money we’d earned hauling coal. Robert was one of my closest friends at Fort Defiance.
    Outside, one of the guys drew a circle in the dirt with a stick. We all shot marbles, trying to make them land inside the circle while hitting someone else’s marble out. After the game, our pockets bulged, and at night, kids crawled around under the dormitory beds looking for dropped marbles.
    After Dora and I completed our first year or two, the school began to send a truck at the beginning of the school year to collect us kids from the Gallup area. We met the truck at the Two Wells Trading Post in Gallup, thirteen or fourteen miles from my home in Chichiltah . On those back-to-school days, Father loaded me, Dora, and any other local school-bound children into his horse-drawn wagon. Older brother Coolidge always returned to school early, so he wasn’t with us. Father brought cold food—roasted mutton or goat, fried bread, and tortillas. At the trading post he fed us, and any other children who arrived, while we waited for the Fort Defiance truck.
    When the truck arrived, we labored up into its bed, then turned back to watch the trading post and Father disappear in the distance. Tears washed tracks down dusty cheeks. We dreaded the long time away from our families, and those of us who were returning students felt a mounting anxiety. As each slow mile unwound, we drew closer to the hated discipline at school.
    To add insult to injury, before I grew older, the bigger boys who rode with us in the truck bed