Centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1491, Navajos were already settled in the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau. However, Navajos weren’t the first inhabitants of the land. According to Anthropologists & historians, Ice-Age Paleo-Indian hunters (12,000-6,000 B.C.) roamed the Monument Valley area thousands of years earlier, followed by archaic hunter gatherers (6,000 B.C-1 A.D.). Evidence of Anasazi in Monument Valley is still visible through their sites and ruins dating before 1300 A.D. But it wasn’t until 1581 that the first Spaniards made contact with the Navajo.

From the cultural perspective, Navajos believe they came to their land by emerging through four levels of worlds, to currently residing in the fourth level, the “Glittering World”.

Navajo Code Talkers

The Navajo Code Talkers served in all six Marine divisions from 1942 to 1945 and have been credited with saving countless lives. Their primary job was to transmit information on tactics, orders and other vital battlefield information via telegraphs and radios in the Diné language. The method of using Morse code often took hours whereas, the Navajos handled a message in minutes. It has been said that if it was not for the Navajo Code Talkers, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima.

The Navajo’s unwritten language was understood by fewer than 30 non-Navajos at the time of WWII. The size and complexity of the language made the code extremely difficult to comprehend, much less decipher. It was not until 1968 that the code became declassified by the US Government. (Sources: Navajocodetakers.org, Discovernavajo.com)

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