Honoring the Navajo Code Talkers Through Portraiture

Elwyn Shorthair (b. 1988; Shiprock, New Mexico) has been painting portraits of Navajo Code Talkers since 2020. He picked up the project from James King who passed in 2019. King helped mentor Shorthair.

The portraits are commissioned by Navajo YES, a nonprofit organization based on the Navajo Nation created to provide positive activities for youth and families, mostly outdoors, like hiking and mountain biking. In 2015, the group began a series of running events, the Navajo Parks Race Series; one such event was called Code Talker 10K.

At that time, many of the famed Navajo Code Talkers were still alive. Navajo YES organizers wanted to give each Code Talker or family member a Code Talker poster. Problem was, they couldn’t find any. They decided to make their own.

Navajo YES contacted local artists to produce portraits of the Code Talkers, the first portrait being John Kinsel Sr., the longest living Code Talker who died at 107 in October of 2024. A thousand posters of Kinsel’s portrait were initially printed and distributed to community members. More since then.

In the decade since the portrait project began, 25 original portraits have been painted with more than 10,000 replica posters given away.

Navajo Code Talker Samuel Holiday portrait commission by James King. Courtesy Navajo YES.

Shorthair’s latest portraits diverge substantially from his first efforts and King’s paintings.

“We'd always done the painting based on photographs that the family had of their Code Talker later in life, pictures of grandpa,” Tom Riggenbach, Navajo YES Executive Director, said. “That made sense. If you look back at the initial paintings, they all reflected that.”

Then, in 2021 or 2022, a Code Talker who died young, Benjamin Cleveland, was due for his portrait. The family – Cleveland had children and grandchildren he never knew – didn’t have any “grandpa” pictures.

“The family asked me can we give you a young Benjamin photo to use in the painting. Of course, that's what they had,” Riggenback remembers. “It was a really dramatic photograph as it turned out, and Elwyn did the painting and it became hugely popular because you now have this photo of this young Navajo warrior – and all the photos are amazing, I'm not trying to put down any other photos – but that photo captured something different.”

It portrayed a Code Talker in youth, not old age, the way they served. The portrait upended contemporary perceptions of the men – so easy it is to forget the old were once young. The Code Talkers served as teenagers and in their early 20s.

Navajo Code Talker Benjamin Cleveland portrait commission by Elwyn Shorthair. Courtesy Navajo YES.

“We do a lot of school presentations on the Code Talker story and kids have in their mind the Code Talkers as older men because those are the images they've seen, or maybe they saw them in a Navajo Nation parade or something. Obviously, they're older men now,” Riggenbach said. “What this photograph did is shift that, and now most of the paintings reflect more of this young Navajo warrior. There’s still an occasional family that will like a more recent photo of grandpa, which is wonderful and certainly their prerogative, but many of the families have gone the route of the young warrior image. It's been really a positive thing for the project in terms of youth being able to connect and relate.”

Shorthair, who’s now painted more than a dozen Code Talker portraits, is presently working on two more at the time of this article’s publication, both in the “young warrior” style.

Coming to the Code Talkers Portraits

Tom Riggenbach, who is not Native, came to the Navajo Nation as a young teacher just out of Illinois State University. He had a professor who visited and told him jobs for teachers were always available there. Riggenbach applied and after a follow-up phone interview headed to Shonto, AZ sight unseen.

He figured he’d stay a year. That was 1988.

“Shonto is a magical place, wonderful people, awesome community,” Riggenbach said.

He hasn’t always lived in Shonto, but has remained on the Reservation.

At one point, he lived in Teec Nos Pos, near the Four Corners, where Shorthair grew up in part. Riggenbach met Shorthair at community events there and when Riggenbach was teaching at Red Valley Cove High School 30 miles southwest of Shiprock, and wanted to put a student art project together, he hired Shorthair to help the kids paint murals.

After James King passed, Shorthair felt like the natural heir apparent for the Code Talkers portrait commissions.

“(Shorthair) gives James a ton of credit for inspiring him and teaching him a lot of intricacies of the art, and if you look at the paintings of the late James King and Elwyn, it’s obvious there some king of connection between these two; the art that Elwyn is doing really reflects on what James did,” Riggenbach said.

Finding his father’s sketchbook and being captivated by the tribal people pictured encouraged Shorthair to begin drawing as a preschooler. Shorthair’s father was not an artist, and he doesn’t know why his dad kept a sketchbook. Whatever the case, Shorthair stuck with it all the way to studying studio arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe from 2007 to 2010 and his professional art career today.

Navajo Code Talker Merril Sandoval portrait commission by Elwyn Shorthair. Courtesy Navajo YES.

Learning About the Code Talkers

Dozens of books, movies, and documentaries have been made about the Navajo Code Talkers. The young men drafted into the Marines straight off their Reservation for service in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Eleven would be killed in action.

The United States, which had only brought misery to the Diné – Navajo – needed help. It needed a fast, efficient, and effective way to communicate on the battlefield, a way to communicate that couldn’t be understood by the enemy.

Previous efforts had failed. The Navajo Code Talkers never did.

Their battlefield communication was double encrypted. Not only did they speak in their native language, Diné bizaad – a language often regarded as the most difficult in the world to learn as a non-native speaker for all of its distinct tones and letters – but the Navajo used code words only known to them, never written down, in place of battlefield terminology. That meant even a native Navajo speaker who heard the code talk would not have been able to easily decipher it. More than 400 distinct code words – substitute words – were ultimately created and memorized by the roughly 400 Navajo who served as Code Talkers during the War.

A Japanese dive bomber became “gini” – chicken hawk. A torpedo plane “tas-chizzie” – swallow. Airplanes were given the names of birds and so on, the instruments of war changed to recognizable features from the Navajo Nation.

An additional alphabet system substituting multiple common Navajo words for letters of the English alphabet was created for spelling words not included in full in the code – “A,” “BE-LA-SANA,” “APPLE” – for instance.

Unbreakable.

Not only that, Diné bizaad was unwritten at the time, meaning there was no available resource anywhere in the world to try and decipher what was being spoken, in the unlikely event the Japanese could make any sense of it. To break the code, the enemy would have had to capture a Code Talker, which is why the Code Talkers had what amounted to bodyguards everywhere they went on the battlefield.

Code Talkers took what had been a 30-minute encrypting process down to 20 seconds with perfect accuracy. Perfect.

This was not the first time the United States military had enlisted Native Americans to use their language as battlefield code. During World War I, the Choctaw were used.

According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s website: “Germany and Japan sent students to the United States after World War I to study Native American languages and cultures, such as Cherokee, Choctaw, and Comanche.”

But not Navajo.

The initial Code Talkers departed for training from the train station at Gallup, NM. The Gallup Cultural Center, right downtown along historic Route 66 and the railroad tracks, continues sharing their story. Look for the Code Talker statue out front. There’s a similar Code Talker statue in Window Rock, AZ on the Navajo Nation, about 25 miles northeast, right in front of the Window Rock.

Two Navajo Code Talkers are still living: Thomas Begay, who just turned 100, and Peter MacDonald.