By the 1930s, the Navajo Nation had experienced decades of federal policies that ranged from paternalistic to actively harmful.

The boarding school era had brought generations of Navajo children to off-reservation schools where speaking Navajo was forbidden.

The government livestock reduction programs of the 1930s — in which federal officials forcibly reduced the number of sheep, goats, and horses on the Navajo reservation in the name of combating overgrazing — had been traumatic for a community whose economy and culture were deeply intertwined with their livestock.

Families who had built their livelihoods around herding found their flocks slaughtered by government agents, and the trauma of that program left scars that lasted generations.

The young men who would become Code Talkers grew up in communities shaped by all of this history.

They were the children and grandchildren of people who had survived the Long Walk and the Bosque Redondo imprisonment, who had rebuilt their lives on the returned reservation, who had resisted the boarding school era’s attack on Diné language and culture with varying degrees of success, and who had experienced the livestock reduction as another episode in a long pattern of federal power exercised without genuine regard for Navajo wellbeing.