The singular focus on the Navajo Code Talkers, while understandable given the size and documentation of that program, can create a misleading impression that the Navajo story was unique when it was part of a broader pattern.

It misses the full weight of the boarding school context.

The federal government’s effort to suppress Navajo and other Native languages was not a vague historical background to the Code Talker story — it was a direct and active policy that affected the generation of men who became Code Talkers.

Some of them had been punished as children for speaking the language that the Marine Corps would later pay them to use.

The contradiction between those two facts is not a simple irony to be noted and moved past.

It is a serious indictment of a policy whose premises were wrong in ways that the Code Talker story makes particularly vivid.