The surviving Code Talkers are very old.

The youngest members of the program, recruited in the final years of the war, are in their late nineties.

Soon there will be no living Code Talkers to speak in their own voices about what they did and what it meant.

What will remain, when the last of them is gone, are the archival records, the oral histories, the medals in families’ homes, the curriculum materials in Navajo Nation schools, and the language itself — still spoken, still taught, still carried forward by the descendants of the people who refused to let the government take it away.

That language is the deepest monument the Code Talkers left.

Not the gold medals, not the museum exhibits, not the films.

The language that was pressured to disappear and that proved, in the crucible of the most destructive war in human history, to be irreplaceable.

It is still here.

— END —