On an afternoon in June, neighbors walked the grass loop of Albuquerque’s 4-H park as kids chased underneath a metal sculpture and stepped on a marker that hints of the unmarked grave site below for students at the old Albuquerque Indian School who died more than 100 years ago.
Draped on a solitary tree nearby were orange tapestries, part of a community-built memorial dedicated to the gravesite near the former site of the Albuquerque Indian School. It went up after someone noticed a plaque missing that commemorated the cemetery for Zuni, Navajo and Apache students buried there between 1882 and 1933.
How the plaque went missing is a mystery, and its absence might have escaped notice a few years ago.
But a discovery in May of 215 unmarked graves at an Indian boarding school in southern British Columbia has sparked heightened awareness of the history and legacy of boarding schools in the United States.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced in late June the agency would investigate the extent to which there was loss of human life in this country and the lasting consequences of boarding schools. The federal government, beginning in the late 1800s, took Indian children from their families in an effort to strip them of their cultures and language. It’s unknown how many Native children were affected over the decades, but, at a minimum, the numbers are into the tens of thousands.
In her announcement, Haaland described boarding school legacies of intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, and disappearance and premature deaths.
What Haaland didn’t include was that the government never returned the right to educate their children back to tribes. Or that Native students continue to lag their peers in educational outcomes.
While the era of boarding schools eventually waned, Native students were largely shifted to state public schools, where tribes didn’t create the curriculum or oversee what their children learned in the classroom.
But in recent years, tribes and Native American experts in Haaland’s home state have been demanding more control, saying they know best how to educate their children. They’re supported by the 2018 Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico court ruling that referenced the Indian boarding school system as an underlying factor in poor educational outcomes among Native students.
In 2018, then-chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors, Edward Paul Torres, bluntly described the importance of the moment to a joint session of the New Mexico Legislature.
Calling Yazzie/Martinez a “landmark decision of monumental proportions,” Torres said, “Not since 1890 when the first Indian education policy was unveiled focused on assimilation have we had such an opportunity as we have today to redefine education that does not destroy who we are as a people.”
EXCAVATING HISTORY
Haaland announced the Interior Department boarding school initiative during the National Congress of American Indians Summit during which Chairman Wilfred Herrera (Laguna) described in detail how the schools “ripped our Pueblo children – some as young as four years old – from the arms of their mothers, stripping them of tender parental care and compassion; many unable to return home until the completion of their studies.”
A member of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico whose own grandparents were subjected to the U.S. residential boarding school system, Haaland, is well-versed in the history and legacy of boarding schools.
But for anyone who wanted to know, that history is well documented. The federal government opened the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879, the first of many boarding schools that became home to Indian children taken from their families. Two years later, the Presbyterian Church opened the Albuquerque Indian School for Navajo, Pueblo and Apache students, transferring control to the federal government in 1884. It was one of many boarding schools that would open in New Mexico.
The goal was to force Native people to shed their cultural identities, language, and spiritual traditions.
Over the past century government reports sounded the alarm about boarding schools. “The Meriam Report of 1928” criticized their inadequate facilities and the removal of children from their homes, stressing repeatedly the need for relevant curriculum adapted to the culture of the children.
Over the following decade, the federal government mostly shifted responsibility for educating Native children to state public schools.
But that didn’t herald an embrace of Indian culture.
“There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears after one of those sessions in which he is taught that his people were dirty, animal-like, something less than a human being,” the then-president of the American Indian Historical Society said of public schools, when speaking before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Indian Education that produced the Kennedy Report of 1969.
Nor did public schools empower tribes to share control of education, despite precedents of successful tribal programs in the 1800s.
The Choctaw of Mississippi and Oklahoma operated about 200 schools and academies, sending numerous graduates to eastern colleges, the Kennedy Report noted. And during the same period, the Cherokee tribe controlled a school system that produced 100 percent literacy. “Anthropologists have determined that as a result of this school system, the literacy level in English of western Oklahoma Cherokees was higher than the white populations of either Texas or Arkansas,” the authors of the reports observed. But those Cherokee and Choctaw school systems were abolished in 1906 when Oklahoma became a state.
More recently, the late state Judge Sarah Singleton cited boarding school history in the Yazzie/Martinez court decision. And the 608 pages of facts and findings undergirding the Yazzie/Martinez decision implicate them as a key factor in poor educational outcomes today.
“Language is the necessary means that provides for the full understanding of the indigenous customs and laws of the Pueblo people,” the document states, drawing from testimony of Regis Pecos, a former governor of Cochiti Pueblo and co-director of the Santa Fe Leadership Institute at the Santa Fe Indian School.
The current public school system is a continued effort at assimilation, one that makes for a fragile existence for tribes today, Pecos said in an interview.
“… our identity, that comes with language and culture and the knowledge of our history and governance and our music, our connections to since the time of origin or creation or emergence, you know, those are all fragile today because of the intentionality of the policies and laws, conceived to assimilate us, to disconnect us from our homelands,” he said.
Today, New Mexico’s Indigenous students, who make up about 34,000, or 11 percent of New Mexico’s K-12 student population, lag behind their New Mexico peers in reading, math, high school graduation and college enrollment. The Yazzie/Martinez decision suggests those outcomes mostly stem from decades of underspending and neglect by New Mexico, shattering the perception that blame rests on children and their families and instead on a systemic failure.
The ruling “exposed that Native children attend systemically under-resourced schools that fail to provide essential educational programs and services and ignore students’ diverse strengths and needs,” the authors of the December 2020 report, “Pathways to Education Sovereignty: Taking a Stand for Native Children,” noted.
In Part Two: This article focuses on the debate over educating Native American children.
By Shaun Griswold
nmindepth.com
