The explicit goal was to break the connection between the child and the language — to make English not merely an additional skill but a replacement for something that was being actively destroyed.

Many of the Navajo men who would go on to serve as Code Talkers had direct experience with the boarding school system.

Some had attended schools where speaking Navajo was forbidden and punished.

Others had attended Bureau of Indian Affairs day schools on the reservation where the pressure toward English was intense, if somewhat less brutal than the boarding school environment.

The generation of Navajo men who were of military age in 1942 had grown up in a world where the federal government was actively discouraging the use and transmission of Diné Bizaad.

And then, in 1942, the federal government decided that Diné Bizaad was strategically invaluable and recruited Navajo men specifically because they could speak it.