Carl Gorman; World War II ‘Code Talker’

Carl Gorman, 90, a World War II “code talker” who encoded military secrets in his Navajo language. Gorman, an art teacher and artist acclaimed throughout the Navajo nation and the American Indian art world, was among the first soldiers recruited for the code talkers in 1942. The Japanese never cracked the Navajo code, which used Navajo bird names to identify aircraft and fish names to identify ships. In the 1970s, Carl Gorman taught art and Native American history at UC Davis, where the C.N. Gorman Museum was dedicated in 1973. On Thursday in Gallup, N.M., of cancer.