In elementary school, I wanted to do a report on them [Navajo Code Talkers], but when my dad took me to the library to do research we couldn’t find any books that covered their achievements. This was before the internet, and I didn’t have any code talkers in my family, so my search ended there. I remember how angry my dad got, driving us back home empty-handed.
COMMENT
I empathize with the anger of the father at finding nothing in the library about his heroes. In the 1990s I was a librarian at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado which offers free tuition for Native American students. As a a consequence, about 10% of students there were Indigenous people. The college is located close to the Navajo Nation so a lot of students were from "The Rez." The library had a Southwest Room where we kept special collections of materials about the local area under lock and key. Anglo students (as we called them) would come into the library to research the usual undergraduate topics-- abortion, gun control, medical marijuana, doping in sports, and so on -- and we'd have plenty of material for them. But when Navajo students wanted to learn about code talkers, uranium mining, downwinders, the Long Walk, or what the heck was going on in complicated tribal politics they had to use the Southwest Room with it's shorter hours and non-circulating books. By categorizing certain materials as rare and valuable, we librarians were inadvertently forcing students who were already educationally disadvantaged [1] to do graduate level research just to write undergraduate papers about their own history and community
[1] Ben Meyers, "Who Lives in an Education Deserts? More People than You Think," Chronicle of Higher Education (July 17, 2018).
Our analysis showed that 29.5 percent of all Native Americans live more than 60 minutes’ drive from a college. Compared with white Americans, Native American adults are more than five times more likely to live in an education desert.
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