A Navajo-owned IT service is opening a new building in Dayton, bringing 100 new jobs and a historical exhibit to the city.
In 1942, the U.S. Marine Corps was in pursuit of a new code. Their military communications heavily relied on large, short-range transmitters on radio signals that had frequent eavesdroppers.
After a series of broken codes, the Marine Corps created a pilot program and recruited 29 Navajo men to create a new code.
On Aug. 14, National Navajo Code Talkers Day is celebrated to honor their work.
“They all volunteered for, quote unquote, a special assignment," said Zonnie Gorman, a historian and descendant of one of the first Navajo code talkers, Carl Gorman. "They didn't know what it was. They just knew it was in the Marine Corps and that they were obviously going into the war.”
The men would create the only known code of the time to remain unbroken. Plus, the code took two minutes to decipher, an improvement from the Marine Corps 30-minute previous best.
“[It was] the first all-Indian, all-Navajo platoon in the history of the Marine Corps," Gorman said. "Once they finished boot camp, they were asked to create a code in their native language. The initial code that they developed was around 200 terms, and it proved to be highly viable.”
Bringing Navajo history to Dayton
Gorman has been working with the Diné Development Corporation, a fully Navajo-owned holding company, as it prepares to open a building in downtown Dayton dedicated to the code talkers.
“What the Navajo code talkers really built was the IT of its day, back in World War II,” Gorman said.
The new office will open in October, after the renovation of the building that formerly housed the Entrepreneurs' Center in the Tech Town business park.
The company works mostly in IT, including within Dayton's defense industry since 2011, along with its subsidiaries, DDC IT Services and Diné Source.
The building will house an innovation center and bring 100 new jobs to the area. The company received a JobsOhio, nine-year Job Creation Tax Credit for the move.
“We're able to invest in this building and helping revitalize the Dayton downtown area and be a core tenant out there," said CEO Austin Tsosie. "We're realizing the DDC's higher purpose to make a difference. We're starting to deliver this high value to tell the story in full and then be able to make a difference for our people.”
The building will also host an exhibit curated by Gorman, Tsosie explained.
“We're able to now start to pull on some of these rich details of the Navajo culture and experience as we continue to compete in this Western world,” Tsosie said. “To tell our full breadth of the story that needs to be told in total about the largest Native American tribe in the United States with the largest land base. My ultimate goal is to really make Navajo a known global economic impact.”
Jocelyn Billy-Upshaw, DDC’s business relations manager, said those working in the defense industry are often familiar with the the history of the Navajo code talkers and curious to know more.
“When you hear Diné or you hear Navajo and you're within the Department of Defense, it's just organic. Like, 'What do you know about the Navajo code talkers?'" she said. "The legacy of the Navajo people is of resilience, is of strength , is of innovation. When you talk about Navajo history, you talk about the Navajo code talkers. You can't talk about one without the other.”
The code talkers program would eventually recruit 400 Navajo men. There are three living today as well as thousands of descendants, according to Billy-Upshaw.
The code was declassified between 1998 and 1999. Since then, Gorman said the true story had been diluted by a more popular one.
“It's been a long time coming that their story has become part of the American fabric,” Gorman said. “But in doing so, it has also become very popularized in American narratives. Our history is, unfortunately, a lot of stereotypes and misinformation. The DDC is wanting to tell the story from a different perspective.”
Gorman, who gives lectures about the history of the code talkers across North America, says the story resonates with many different people she has spoken to.
“By sharing the story of the Navajo code talkers, it becomes more concrete and more complex and more humanized for people to be able to see Indigenous history," she said.
Over 400,000 Navajo people
The Navajo Nation’s territory makes up just over 16 million acres, an area larger than 10 of the 50 states.
A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling decided the U.S. government is not responsible for the Navajo reservation’s access to running water, where over a third of homes do not have running water.
“We have a lot of people that struggle from poverty, that lack access to electricity or even water and access to capital and the banking structures. We don't have access to really compete in the Western world," Tsosie said. "We've got a large job to do in catching up. That's really the spirit of economic development that the DDC was created under.”
The recent case referenced the 1868 peace treaty that defined Navajo lands in U.S. law. The reservation sits right along the Colorado River Basin, a large body of water that has become a hot commodity for bordering states. The Supreme Court ruling defended the states’ rights to that water.
Tsosie said the water the reservation does have access to is subject to contamination from abandoned uranium mining waste.
“There's over 508 abandoned mines that are currently poisoning our people. We're utilizing that and leveraging our heritage to be able to push it in initiatives not only to grow the business, but to bring awareness about the Navajo people.”
Contamination from mill waste has long found its way into the water and resources of Navajo land. Research on the atomic bomb and the area’s uranium-rich sedimentary rock brought a boom in milling operations in the 1940s that ended in the late 1980s.
The EPA deemed “more than 100 mine piles of mine waste” of the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District one of their Superfund sites in 2024.
“It is so difficult to get the attention, to get the funding, to get the resources we need to clean up our own lands,” Tsosie said. “Because of the success that DDC has had, we're able to give this extra added value to the Navajo community.”
He said the company's profits pay dividends to the Navajo Nation every year. In September 2023 the company paid the Nation $500,000.
"We follow a social work model that measures community benefit, wealth creation, environmental stewardship and economic reconciliation," Tsosie said. "We give back and sponsor and donate in various ways."