The Navajo Code Talkers were a group of about 400 Navajo men who served in the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War, using their native language to transmit military communications in a code that was never broken by the Japanese. The museum in downtown Gallup tells their story in the context of the Navajo Nation, whose reservation borders the city.
The exhibit is modest by major museum standards but significant for what it covers — not just the wartime achievement but the broader history of the Navajo people and their relationship with the US government, which had spent the previous century trying to suppress the very language that proved decisive in the Pacific. The contradiction is acknowledged directly. Gallup's position as the main trading city for the Navajo Nation gives the museum a grounding that you don't get from a distant urban institution.