“They were placed at different airports,” Frank Tomkins recalled of his brothers. “Then they’d send a message in nêhiyawêwin about how many aircraft, what kinda aircraft was going on this bombing run in England, and the party on the other end would translate it back into English.”

In an interview recorded by the Memory Project, a national archive of veterans’ testimonies, Frank shared a story about the teachings that shaped his family long before they found themselves on the battlefield. Their grandmother was a Plains Cree woman, widow of Chief Poundmaker and niece of Big Bear, a resistance leader during the 1885 North-West Rebellion. She believed in the old ways and passed that knowledge on to her grandsons. One of the things she taught them was a war song, something to sing when their lives were in danger. She didn’t explain it, Frank said. She just told them to remember it. 

Later, in a trench under heavy fire, Checker looked up and saw an uncle who had passed away years earlier but now seemed to be “laughing and motioning him to come towards him,” Frank recalled. Checker stood up and walked toward his kin. Moments later, a shell hit the exact spot where he’d been sitting, killing two of his friends. “He believed his uncle saved him,” Frank said. “That’s the Indian way, you might say.”

Because nêhiyawêwin reflects fluidity, relationship and ongoing motion, its logic runs counter to the rigid, hierarchical, object-oriented frameworks of war. With five major regional dialects, nêhiyawêwin isn’t uniform across territories, something that added another layer of complexity for communication and consistency during wartime coding. Since there were no direct translations for the words of modern warfare, the code talkers turned to what the language did hold: a deep relationship with the land. The Spit-fire aircraft became iskotêw (fire), the Mustang fighter was called pakwâtastim (wild horse), fighter bombers were called sakimês (mosquito), and a B-17 bomber was encoded as âmow têpakohposâp (bee and 17).