Christmas in the Trenches

Navajo Code Talkers & Symbolic Language

Dec 24, 2023

I have never felt a chill like the one that gripped me in France in November 1988 as I prepared for a ceremony on land where Native American servicemen, known as code talkers, fought and helped U.S. forces achieve military victory. My then-husband, Lewis, and I had traveled from California to Paris, where we spent a few days visiting museums, eating blood sausage and delicate pastries, and drinking fine wine and French press coffee. From there, we traveled by French Rail to Mulhouse, located in the Alsace region on the Swiss and German border. As we ate and rode in the first class dining car, I viewed the passing countryside dotted by quaint, rustic, stone villages from my window seat. The French have managed to avoid urban sprawl by concentrating their villages in between sustainable agricultural land, which further instilled in me a love for the pastoral and an appreciation for a light footprint.

Two healers who practiced energetic medicine had invited Lewis and me to France to present a Native American Medicine and Spirituality workshop, which included building a sweat lodge and conducting an inipi ceremony. I learned that Europeans have a fascination with Native American culture and history. The more recent colonization of the Americas gave them an understanding and insight into the colonization of their indigenous peoples. In addition to the ceremony, I would perform an evening concert at the historic Chateau of Madame Bull, where we stayed. Lil Bull, a visionary artist and painter, only spoke French, testing my untrained ear as Lewis, who is part French, dutifully translated.

Lil Bull, private collection of Thea Summer Deer

Madame Bull, an eccentric, unmarried, elegant older woman, pinned her silvery grey hair with ornate combs that accentuated her high cheekbones and strong jawline. She fed us simple dinners made from food grown at the chateau. Copious amounts of steaming cabbage and potatoes from the garden were presented on large platters and placed in the center of the table by Lil’s staff. The cabbage, seasoned with garden herbs, tasted warm and buttery, with a hint of vinegar that brought out the flavor. Accompanying what seemed to be the main dish of cabbage and potatoes, we ate salty meat, freshly baked bread, and salad greens tossed in oil and vinegar and drank fine, earthy red wine.

Performing my original music to a packed house at the chateau made me very nervous, mainly since no one spoke to me in English beforehand. How could I sing to a French audience that wouldn’t understand my lyrics? To keep from collapsing into fear, I chose instead to focus on the feelings behind the words, to sing from the universal language of my heart. Afterward, the audience warmly applauded and then, to my surprise, walked up to me, opened their mouths, and complimented me in English. We had understood each other on a whole different level. Music does that. It removes barriers.

Chateau house concert, Mulhouse, France 1988

Building the sweat lodge behind the chateau proved more difficult than anticipated, with another set of barriers. The icy November air bit at the heels of Lewis, me, and the workshop participants as we spent hours cutting and tying branches and digging holes in the cold hard ground with great effort. Our hands ached, and our limbs stiffened. Fallen leaves thickly layered the ground and lay damp and rotting. We dug into dirt that smelled as rich and old as the chateau that rested upon it.

Lewis received a shocking surprise when he dug up a live shell from World War Two. The genuine potential danger gravely concerned everyone. Lewis also had to consider the risk of an explosion should the ceremonial fire find a live buried shell. The risk of another encounter with more holes left to dig slowed the work down considerably. Lewis grew serious and questioned whether we should proceed, then halted the work. The day grew late and colder. We needed guidance from the spirits of the land. So Lewis loaded the sacred pipe with tobacco, metaphorically entered the trenches, and began to pray.

Lewis & Thea building a sweat lodge in France

The spirits answered by granting a cloak of protection. The land and its people needed healing from the battles waged there. The men agreed to proceed using caution. With bones aching from the cold, I retreated with the women to the chateau to drink hot chocolate and make prayer ties by the hearth’s warming fire. But the fear I felt at the idea that Lewis or I could die in France, blown up from some long-ago unexploded ordnance, is not why I had come there. More than a century after the war, hundreds of millions of artillery shells still lay beneath the rich earth in Northern France. What spirits had we arrived there to help heal?

Around the dinner table that night, Lil informed us that the chateau had been the site of a battle where Native American code talkers had confused the Germans with a secret code that proved indecipherable, helping to win several battles waged in the area. Hundreds of thousands of Germans who had been living in England, working as cab drivers, waiters, and construction workers, had to leave their jobs and homes to go back to Germany and fight against the people they had driven around and lived next door to. They had thought the war would be over by Christmas.

Lewis saw the presence of code talkers at the sweat lodge site as a sign. With both Native American and French ancestry, he felt uniquely called to help heal the land and himself. We worked with the spirits still walking between the worlds, supporting them to move on through prayer and ceremony. We paid homage to the warriors who fought for our freedoms, lest we forget how quickly they can be taken from us, as we have seen all too recently. That day, I heard the spirit’s voices rising in my head like the crackle of old dry leaves, and they said, we fought and died so you wouldn’t have to. Listen. Remember. Be free.

Many questions arose in my mind that made no sense. I felt confused. Why would Native Americans fight side by side with white men against other white men to protect land that had been stolen from them by white men? I didn’t have answers, but I believe, as they do, that the land belongs to no one. We belong to the land. Perhaps that is the answer: a deep-rooted need to protect one’s homeland against a perceived threat.

The code talkers were mainly Navajo and those who fought in France, Comanche. Navajo people remembered because they had no written language. It is how they developed such a code. The songs, prayers, and stories are all handed down in an oral tradition. The Navajo listen. They hear and learn to remember everything. Lewis’s work in narrative medicine also helps to keep the story-medicine tradition alive, as do the stories in my songs.

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? – Gabrielle Roth

Using their native tongue, Navajo Indians devised and implemented a secret code that never was broken using a language beaten out of them in boarding schools and then suddenly became a weapon needed to fight a war. The weaponization of language is upon us again as we continue to fight culture wars. We may have won a few battles but we are losing something far more precious: the ability to decode symbolic language.

All language is a series of codes. The Fire Element in Chinese Medicine decodes and generates symbolic communication so that we may interpret the language of life. In the wisdom of the Five Elements, an alchemical system not unlike Native American Medicine, the Fire Element corresponds with the Heart. It is responsible for intracellular communication and information collected primarily through the senses. The nervous system assimilates and interprets the essence of that information. Decisions made at the cellular level generate new messages sent out to all parts of the body about what needs to occur. It is an elegant system, but we live in a world that has put our nervous systems under assault.

When the Fire Element and Heart are healthy, the information is reliable and accurate, and we can trust it. When imbalanced, the senses become distorted. Shock and trauma disrupt the Fire Element and damage the Heart. In Western culture, what we associate with mental illness is an imbalance of the Fire Element in Chinese Medicine. The ability to extract meaning from interactions becomes distorted in some way. The Fire Element determines sensory clues we assign meaning to and governs the ability to understand intentions. The Heart’s job is to collect and interpret sensual and emotional experiences and imbue them with meaning. It is an energetic process of extracting essence. Words become further imbued with meaning in a cultural context. The ability to code my experience and communicate it to you, and your ability to decode and give it meaning, is under the realm of the Fire Element. This process is essential for good and effective communication.

In a world of war and chaos, and with a Fire Element burning out of control due to the depletion of deep feminine yin of the Water Element through its corresponding emotion of fear, we are going mad. Native peoples have much to teach us about the human heart and the heart of the land we belong to. The more we disconnect, the less our lives are imbued with meaning. A secret code lives within our hearts, but how will we unlock and decipher it if we are at war with ourselves and each other? A little over 100 years ago, on Christmas Eve, a chocolate cake arrived at a British trench, sent over by the Germans with an invitation to a concert they wanted to hold in honor of their captain, who was celebrating his birthday. “Cease your fire and leave your guns,” they said. “Bring only empty hands.” Listen – Remember – Be Free…

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Christmas in the Trenches

Navajo Code Talkers & Symbolic Language

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