The Code Talker story fit naturally into this reconsideration.

It provided a vivid illustration of the contradiction at the heart of assimilation policy: the federal government had simultaneously tried to destroy Native languages and cultures and had depended on those same languages and cultures when it needed something the mainstream American culture could not provide.

That contradiction did not go unnoticed by Native communities.

Navajo Nation leaders and educators who were working in the 1970s and 1980s to rebuild Navajo language education — to reverse the damage done by generations of boarding school-era suppression — found the Code Talker story a powerful argument for the value of what they were trying to preserve.

If the language had been secure enough to carry the most sensitive military communications in the Pacific, it was clearly a language worth maintaining and transmitting.

The argument was not merely instrumental — not simply that Navajo should be preserved because it might prove militarily useful again.