For the vast majority of Native Ameri-can students in federal Indian boarding schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the experience was nothing short of tragic. Dislocated from family and community, they were forced into an educational system that sought to erase their Indian identity as a means of accul-turating them to white society. However, as historian John Gram reveals, some Indian communities on the edge of the American frontier had a much dierent experienceeven influencing the type of education their children received.

Shining a spotlight on Pueblo Indians interactions with school ocials at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools, Gram examines two rare cases of o-reser-vation schools that were situated near the communities whose children they sought to assimilate. Far from the federal governments reach and in competition with nearby Catholic schools for students, Indian boarding school ocials were in no position to make demands and instead were forced to pick their cultural battles with nearby Pueblo parents, who visited the schools regularly. As a result, Pueblo Indians were able to exercise their agency, influencing everything from classroom curriculum to school functions. As Gram reveals, they often mitigated the schools assimilation eorts and assured the various pueblos cultural, social, and economic survival.

Greatly expanding our understanding of the Indian boarding school experience, Education at the Edge of Empire is grounded in previously overlooked archi-val material and student oral histories. The result is a groundbreaking examina-tion that contributes to Native American, Western, and education histories, as well as to borderland and Southwest studies. It will appeal to anyone interested in knowing how some Native Americans were able to use the typically oppressive boarding school experience to their advantage.

John R. Gram teaches at Southern Methodist University.

Jacket design: Thomas Eykemans. Jacket photos: (front)

Young boys at Albuquerque Indian School (detail), ca. 1895.

(back) Older girls at Albuquerque Indian School in their school

uniforms (detail), ca. 191o. General Correspondence Files of

the Albuquerque Indian School, National Archives and Records

AdministrationDenver, 292869 (front), 292873 (back).

Gram oers a highly engaging account of Pueblo Indian students and their experi-ences at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian schools. His book reveals an intense power dynamic between parents, school ocials, the Catholic church, and the students themselves. No other single scholarly work interrogates the ways Pueblo students and their tribal communities experienced these institutions.Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, author of Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 19021929

The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were more than passive victims in the face of federal eorts to dispossess their children of their cultural identities. With issues of power, culture, and agency at its very center, Education at the Edge of Empire constitutes an important contribution to the literature on Indian boarding schools.David Wallace Adams, author of Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 18751928

University of Washington PressSeattle and London

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Negotiating Pueblo Identity

in New Mexicos Indian

Boarding Schools

John R. Gram

Foreword by Theodore Jojola

(continued on back flap)

ISBN 978-0-295-99477-2

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gram-jacket.pdf 1 4/22/15 3:52 PM

Charlotte Cot, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert,

and Coll Thrush, Series Editors

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Education at the Edge of Empire

Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexicos

Indian Boarding Schools

John R. GR am

Foreword by Thodore Jojola

Uni v eR sity of WashinGton PR ess

Seattle and London

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2015 by the University of Washington PressPrinted and bound in the United States of AmericaComposed in Charter, a typeface designed by Matthew Carter18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Uni v eR sity of WashinGton PR esswww.washington.edu/uwpress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress

isBn 978-0-295-99477-2

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.481984.

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For Kristin, Melody, and Kerysas is everything

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There is no one who has been a close observer of Indian history who is not well satisfied that one of the two things must eventually take place, to wit, either civilization or extinction.

Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price, 1881

To uproot a child from his natural environment without making any effort to teach him how to adjust himself to a new environment, and then send him back to the old, especially with a people at a stage of civilization where the influence of family and home would normally be all-controlling, is to invite disaster.

Meriam Report, 1928

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Contents

List of Illustrations xiForeword xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

intRodUctionEastern Reforms Encounter Southwestern Communities

3

chaPteR 1The Economics of Education:

The True Cost of Keeping the Doors Open23

chaPteR 2The Consequences of Competition:

The Fight to Control the Flow of Pueblo Students57

chaPteR 3Geographies of Imagination:

Competing Understandings of People and Place in the Southwest83

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chaPteR 4Everyday Encounters:

Daily Life at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools107

chaPteR 5The Integration of Worlds:

What Students and Their Communities Made of the Boarding School Experience

141

conclUsionThe Successful Legacy of Assimilations Failure

171

Appendix 177Notes 201

Bibliography 231Index 239

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Illustrations

Figures

1.1. Leaders from nearby pueblos visit Albuquerque Indian School, ca. 1885 32

2.1. School employees of Albuquerque Indian School, ca. 1910 61

3.1. Students stand at attention at Albuquerque Indian School, ca. 1910 90

4.1. Older girls at Albuquerque Indian School in their school uniforms, ca. 1910 110

4.2. Young boys at Albuquerque Indian School in their school uniforms, ca. 1912 111

5.1. Several members of nearby pueblos visit Albuquerque Indian School, ca. 1912 152

Tables

1.1. Albuquerque Indian School Enrollment by Year 361.2. Santa Fe Indian School Enrollment by Year 371.3. Albuquerque Indian School Enrollment by Grade 531.4. Santa Fe Indian School Enrollment by Grade 533.1. Individual Runaways in SFIS Records 100

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xii illUstR ations

3.2. Individual Runaways in AIS Records 1024.1. Daily Routine for Santa Fe Indian School, 191112 School Year 1154.2. Daily Routine for Albuquerque Indian School, 191314 School Year 1154.3. Students Participating in the Outing System at AIS and SFIS 1234.4. Reported Significant Disease Outbreaks at AIS and SFIS 1334.5. Limited Santa Fe Indian School Hospital Records 1345.1. Employment of Returned Students from AIS and SFIS 165

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Foreword

Theodore Jojola

When the Albuquerque Indian School (AIS) was founded in 1881, Albuquerque was literally a one-horse town. New Mexico was still an American territory. The last US campaign against the Comanches occurred in 1874, and the railroad finally reached town in 1880. In that year, Albuquerques population was esti-mated to be only 2,315, and New Town (now downtown Albuquerque) only existed on a blueprint.

The denizens of Albuquerque saw economic opportunity in an Indian school. They seeded the campus with sixty-six acres of swamp grassland, bought for a paltry $4,300. That investment grew manifold. By 1892, the school already had a sprawling campus, with forty-four acres under cultivation and an enrollment of 314. By comparison, the University of New Mexico (UNM) had been founded in 1889 with just one building and seventy-five students.

Originally opened by the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, AIS trans-ferred to US government control in 1886. Education was met through religious and military indoctrination by a system exemplified at the Carlisle Indian In-dustrial School. Children from the surrounding region, largely Pueblo, Navajo and Apache, were uprooted from their communities and detained at the school.

From the beginning, the school was beset by ideological challenges. In 1892, a writ of habeas corpus by the itinerant journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis was filed on behalf of his Isleta Pueblo landlord. It accused the schools superin-tendent, William B. Creager, of instigating a Presbyterian plan to kidnap and detain children against their will. By then, Pueblo parents had already begun

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withholding their children at the urging of Roman Catholic parish priests. Un-der the weight of declining enrollment, the superintendent relented, and the school became less a one-way agent of white assimilation and more open and community oriented. Over the long term, the shift facilitated the cultural cross-assimilation of both students and faculty alike. Native students aspired to be like their mentors, and the teachers opened themselves up to the Indian culture. Nowhere in the litany of Indian boarding schools did this appear to happen.

At the school, boys were educated in the industrial trades, while the girls had to settle for the domestic arts. These vocations provided for much of the schools own needs. The students grew much of their own food, tailored and fashioned their own clothing, and even provided the labor for school construc-tion and upkeep. The schools outing program farmed out the Indian children to responsible white people. to work as housekeepers and helpers.

By the turn of the century, the campus became the civilized hub of New Town, where residents took part in social events and galas. Native children were lauded for their intelligence, and their school projects were showcased in venues far and wide. Items such as pottery, art, jewelry, and weaving were regularly exhibited at local fairs; in 1904, students pottery was even showcased at the Worlds Fair in Saint Louis.

When New Mexico gained statehood in 1912, AIS had a kindergarten, a primary school, and eight regular grades. It boasted that its students had made 1,500 pairs of shoes and baked 140,000 loaves of bread. Its scholastics were said to integrate good health, Christian values, learning a trade, and the love of music and good books.

By the time US Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier ended the mili-tary system for all Indian boarding schools in 1932, AIS had already added an eleventh and twelfth grades. The campus consisted of forty-eight buildings, and in 1931, 927 students were enrolled, 304 of them in high school.

Regimental education was abolished, and the curriculum was expanded to include a Native Arts and Crafts department. Boys were instructed in silver-smithing. Two native women who did weaving and embroidery were hired as full-time instructors to teach the girls. The departments fame in these crafts became equal to the Dorothy Dunn Indian Art Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School.

As the students continued to excel in their basic studies, those with the high-est academic potential were singled out for a downtown student exchange program. In order to prove to the rest of the region that Indian children were equal in intelligence to other children, they were placed at local Catholic and

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public schools. In time, a UNM Lodge was created at AIS to board Indian stu-dents.

Although the school physically divided the sexes and controlled their social interactions, many intertribal marriages occurred among its graduates. When it came to serving during wartime, both the schools young men and young women volunteered. They willingly fought and died in World War I, World War II, and other wars. Many of the famed Navajo Code Talkers were graduates of AIS. This all went by way of saying that the school prepared students to assume their rightful roles as dual citizens, both inside and outside their traditional communities.

Despite the schools accomplishments, the ill winds of Indian policy change eventually weakened its foundation. Beginning with the Termination Policy of the 1950s, the school gradually became estranged from the Indian commu-nity. The Johnson OMalley (JOM) program took Indian children out of the boarding system and placed them in the public school system. In the 1960s, the Navajo Nation used JOM funds to establish a bordertown program at AIS. Although Navajo children continued to be housed there, they went to public school. The campus essentially became divided.

In the 1970s, tribal people became increasingly disillusioned by the inad-equacy of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) system. Moreover, the Red Power movement emboldened them to rally against it. This affected the quality of education at AIS, especially after funds to support instruction and programs were cut. In 1975, the BIA reported that 75 percent of the schools student body had been expelled from other schools and that AIS had been singled out as the worst of the worst. In 1977, the All Indian Pueblo Council (AIPC) used the provisions of the Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act to take over the management of the school. By the next year, however, enroll-ment had declined to 156 and the majority of the schools buildings were in disrepair or vacant.

In 1981, twenty-two students and six staff members nearly succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of a faulty gas furnace. This incident prompted the AIPC to close the school and transfer the remaining students to the Santa Fe Indian School. In spite of proposals to rehabilitate the campus, the buildings were boarded up and fenced off.

The buildings were used to store school and Office of Indian Services re-cords, which contributed to their demise after scores of homeless people broke in to them and burned sheaves of papers to keep warm. Building fires became so frequent that the Albuquerque Fire Department stopped responding alto-

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gether. Any effort to salvage the campus came to a halt after two buildings on the National Register of Historic Placesthe auditorium and the gymnasiumburned down. In 1988, a heavy equipment demolition project was staged, and all of the structuresincluding memorial trees from epochs pastwere razed. The campus was plowed under, its fragments returned to the earth.

Todays efforts to reconstruct the history of the school show huge gaps in our knowledge. But, as the following book will attest, much of what was the Albuquerque Indian School lives on in memory. The bulk of the written records went up in smoke alongside the historic buildings that housed them. Only tan-talizing tidbits remain and, for the most part, are hidden in obscure federal record holdings or stored in the cedar chests of deceased alumni and staff.

Yet in spite of the infamous boarding school mantra Kill the Indian, save the man (espoused by Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder Colonel Richard Henry Pratt), no Indian was killed at AIS. Indeed, one may conclude that AIS was a happy and nurturing place. This is the pervading sentiment of its alumni, who speak of lifetime friendships, marriages, and coming-of-age. In a word, AIS provided opportunity. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Theodore (Ted) Jojola is Distinguished Professor and Regents Professor at the University of New Mexico and an enrolled tribal member of the Pueblo of Isleta.

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Ted Jojola, as well as the Santa Fe Indian School Board of Trustees. In addition to writing the foreword for this book, Ted generously provided insight, advice, and encouragement throughout the research and writing process. He also read through several copies of the manuscript. This is a better book because of his involvement.

The Santa Fe Indian School Board of Trustees granted me permission to quote from the Santa Fe Indian School: The First 100 Years projecta collection of transcripts from interviews conducted with previous students and employees of both the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. My goal has been to handle this valuable resource in a manner that honors their generosity, as well the individuals who shared their stories as part of the project.

Several colleagues read this manuscript in its entirety. Sherry Smith has been a constant encouragement since I met her as a graduate student. Her criti-cal eye, keen insights, and gentle prodding were crucial. She is the consummate mentor-teacher-scholar. I am also indebted to John Chvez and Crista DeLuzio, both of whom pored over more than one copy of the manuscript, helping to create a more coherent, concise, and (I hope!) well-written work.

My research agenda took me on more than a few trips around the western United States, and I was fortunate enough to receive funds from several sources. Many thanks to the William P. Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University for a generous travel grant. A tremendous thank you is also due to Mildred Pinkston and Sharon Piersonassistants extraordinaire

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who displayed infinite patience in the face of a barrage of questions and who routinely do the impossible.

Southern Methodist University is truly blessed to have the William P. Cle-ments Center for Southwest Studies on campus. Among its many benefits, the center affords students tremendous opportunities to engage top-notch schol-ars and also provides very generous research grants, of which I was fortunate enough to receive two for conducting research in Denver and Albuquerque. A very hearty thanks to Andrea Boardman and Ruth Ann Elmore for all of their assistance and tremendous work at the center.

The library system at Southern Methodist University (SMU), my home library for this project, is second to none, and on those rare occasions when SMU did not have a book or article I needed, I was fortunate enough to have access to the top-notch services of Interlibrary Loans. Billie Stoval, in particular, went above and beyond the call of duty in helping me to track down elusive government records.

Researching away from the SMU campus was also a pleasure, thanks to the professional staffs I encountered at each facility I visited. Special thanks go to the helpful and knowledgeable staff of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. I would also like to thank the National Archives staff of Den-verespecially Eric Bittner, who was the perfect guide for a first-time visitor. Erics help was also critical in securing photographs. Additional thanks go to the staff of the University of New Mexico Library, in particular to the staff of the Zimmerman Library and the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections.

A huge thank you to Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, who first pursued this project for the Indigenous Confluences series at the University of Washington Press. Matt was a patient and helpful guide throughout the entire process, from proposal to publication. The introduction, in particular, greatly benefited from his insight. I could not have asked for anyone better to shepherd me through the publication process than Ranjit Arab and Tim Zimmermann at the Univer-sity of Washington Press. Finally, thank you to Kerrie Maynes for her excellent copyediting, as well as Jacqueline Volin of University of Washington Press for guiding the manuscript through the final stages.

My deepest gratitude I reserve for my wife, Kristin, who always believed that this project would see the light of dayeven on those days when she had to believe for the both of us. And no one sacrificed more to see it through. All my love to you, and to our children. Always.

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Education at the Edge of Empire

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3Introduction

Eastern Reforms Encounter Southwestern Communities

a small PamPhlet PUBlished By the alBUqUeRqUe indian school (AIS) in 1884 attempted to explain both the rationale for and the urgency of its mission among the Pueblo Indians. The Pueblos, it explained, seemed to have hardly benefited at all from their long exposure to Spanish civilization, and now the failure of the Spanish Empire had become the responsibility of the American people. According to this pamphlet, the situation was dire in 1881, the year the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions founded the school: [The Pueblos] were being rapidly surrounded by an aggressive American civilization and without the help of Christian education their extinction was inevitable.1

From the time the first European set foot in the Western Hemisphere, peo-ples of the Old World were obsessed with the existence and ultimate fate of the indigenous populations of the New. As the United States gradually expanded across the continent and encountered these various indigenous populations, it, too, inherited this obsession. The Indian question or the Indian problem might be stated thus: what are the responsibilities of a self-perceived morally and culturally superior people toward those perceived to be lost in savagery, and thus in constant danger of drowning in the wake of the ever-growing wave of progress?2 The AIS pamphlet answered that question this way: It is impolitic for a superior race to allow an inferior one to die out in their midst, and it is unchristian in the extreme.3

During the last half of the nineteenth century, the Indian question under-went a significant metamorphosis. With the conquest for Indian land nearly

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over, those calling for the redemption, rather than the destruction, of the Na-tive American population gained permanent ascendancy.4 Armed with contem-porary scientific theory that suggested that populations must either advance up the ladder of civilization or fall into oblivion, a new generation of reformers, philanthropists, and government officials quickly developed a new multifaceted solution designed to save Indians from themselves.5

One part of the solution was the creation of a vast network of government-run Indian schools, mostly in the trans-Mississippi West. This book focuses on the interactions between two such schools, the Albuquerque Indian School and the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS), and their Pueblo students. Attempts at as-similating Native Americans through education, and government involvement in those efforts, were not new phenomena. What was different this time was the extent of government involvement.6 The grand scale of government involve-ment changed the face of Indian education, which up to this point had largely been the domain of religious groups that trained missionary-teachers and built schools. As Frederick E. Hoxie, a noted historian of indigenous people in North America, explains, Instruction evolved from a haphazard affair directed by evangelical missionaries and incompetent placemen to an orderly system run by trained professionals.7

Though the training and professionalism of Office of Indian Services per-sonnel did not always exceed that of the religious personnel they replaced, the sheer organizational and bureaucratic power that the government could bring to bear could be impressive. Government officials created a three-tiered system of schools, beginning with teaching students in their homes through day schools, after which students attended reservation boarding schools (usu-ally located at agency headquarters), and finally the off-reservation boarding schools that stood at the top of the system. Both the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools fell into this last category.8 Here (in theory) students would spend five or more years enduring a constant linguistic, cultural, and psycho-logical assault designed to recreate them in the image of the dominant Anglo-American society. The belief was that these children would then return home as catalysts for the change needed in their home communities.9

Historian Clyde Ellis, who has written on the Kiowa experience at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School in Oklahoma notes, The long-term hope was that, guided by the liberating experience of the school, children would serve their communities as beacons of change and examples of proper living. It was a grand plan, for schooling meant more than simply inculcating Indian children with white education: it was the definitive moment in the metamorphosis of a

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people.10 This grand plan found a much-needed champion in Richard Henry Pratt, a former military officer whose experiments in teaching Native American adult prisoners of war convinced him that education could and would save the Indian race. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in an aban-doned army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with the express purpose of creating a school environment that would isolate children from the perceived negative influences of home for a crucial period, while also indoctrinating them in the ways of the superior American civilization. They could then take the lessons back to the reservations with them as part of the larger effort to as-similate their people.11

Pratt once described the schools purpose thus: Kill the Indian, save the man. In many ways, the boarding schools were a continuation of the former American Indian Wars. The days of cavalry engagements and camp raids were nearly over. Yet it would be soldiers once againnow assimilated Indian chil-dren dressed in the pseudomilitary uniforms provided by boarding schoolswho would carry out this final campaign against barbarism. As one work puts it succinctly, The [boarding schools] sought to save the Indians from vanishing by substituting a policy of cultural genocide for the old policies of removal and actual genocide.12 For its Anglo employees, the boarding school represented a clash of two worldscivilization and savagery. In the end, each student had to be convinced to join the modern world or risk being lost forever in the fading world of his or her doomed past.

In their work on Native education history and indigenous sovereignty, Creek scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima and educational anthropologist Teresa L. Mc-Carty have argued that scholars should see the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century not as a final, sustained campaign in a war against Indian savagery but as yet another moment in the history of US-Indian rela-tions in which government officials (including boarding school personnel) had to decide which aspects of Indian culture and society were safe enough to be allowed to continue, and which were so dangerous to the future of Native Americans that they had to be wiped out.13 Lomawaimas and McCartys Safety Zone Theory helps to make sense of some otherwise confusing actions taken by school officials. Certainly, there were times when the personnel of the Albu-querque and Santa Fe Indian Schools made decisions or allowed activities that are puzzling in light of the nature of the federal boarding schools as colonizing institutions designed to destroy indigeneity.

The language of the Safety Zone Theory is also helpful for another reason: school officials at AIS and SFIS had to determine not only what was safe and

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dangerous for their students but also for themselves. School personnel had surprisingly little power over their students or over nearby Pueblo communi-ties. Beyond determining whether or not to confront some aspect of Indian culture or society, they had to decide if they had sufficient power to win the confrontation. In other words, they had to choose not only what battles they should fight, but what battles they could fight at any given time.

Like other off-reservation boarding schools, the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were supposed to house students from a variety of tribes. In point of fact they did, but the overwhelming majority of students who passed through the doors of both institutions were Pueblo, tying the schools and these particular Indian communities together with often surprising results and in unexpected relations of power. Various factors served to limit, compromise, and even morph the supposedly clear mission of these boarding schools: scarce resources and funds, competition with other educational institutions and other Anglo-Americans, a strong Catholic presence in the region, geographic prox-imity to students homes, previous encounters between Pueblos and colonial powers, and the distinctive manner in which Anglos viewed Pueblos vis--vis other Native American groups. Moreover, the Pueblos exercised power in their relationships with the schools superintendents and consequently turned the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools into resources that often helped as-sure the various pueblos cultural, social, and economic survival.

The failure of these two schools to assimilate Indian communities by educat-ing their children is not surprising. The existing literature confirms that, based on the federal governments goal of assimilation, the boarding school experi-ence as a whole was a failure for numerous reasons. Many scholars have con-ducted studies of individual boarding schools and found that the realities at the boarding schools failed to match the colonial ideas established by government officials and reformers who had the model of Carlisle in their mind. As historian Robert Trennert Jr., explains in his work on the Phoenix Indian School, The western schools developed a personality of their own.... Philosophical, racial, and educational theories ... must be considered in the light of local conditions to evaluate the successes and failure of the educational system.14

Other scholars writing about individual schools have generally confirmed Trennerts findings, while adding their own surprising conclusions. In particu-lar, scholars discovered the irony that not only did the boarding schools fail to destroy Indianness, but they actually helped lead to the creation of a new pan-Indian identity, as students met members of other tribes around the nation. Students may have lost some of the distinctiveness of their individual tribal

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identities, but they did not lose the sense that they were still somethingall of them together were somethingdifferent than Anglo school personnel and the larger American culture that the schools represented.15 But this was not the only way in which boarding schools failed. As Lomawaima notes, The fact that schools often strengthened rather than dissolved tribal identity is not the only surprise tucked within alumni reminiscences. The idealized school society envi-sioned in federal policy often bore little resemblance to reality.... The military methods, for example, used to organize and control students were incapable of encouraging individuality or creativity and were ill-suited to produce indepen-dent citizens, the avowed goal of federal education policy.16

Finally, scholars have demonstrated that Native Americans exercised a sometimes surprising amount of power in their efforts to use boarding schools and the boarding school experience for their own ends. For example, Hopi historian Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, who has published extensively on the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, places this power at the very heart of his study of Hopi students at the school. Rather than succumbing to the disruptive and destructive force that Sherman might have been, Sakiestewa Gilbert argues that Hopi students used the experience to their advantage, as they continued the cycle of Hopi tradition [of migrating in order to learn ways to be useful to Hopi society], and returned to the Hopi mesas with new respon-sibilities as Hopi people.17 In doing so, Sakiestewa Gilbert consciously draws on the concept of turning the power introduced by Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, which claims that students often managed to turn the boarding school experience into something that could benefit them and their communities.18

The Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools failed, then, as all federal boarding schools ultimately failed. They failed for similar reasons, but also for reasons unique to their own situationor at least not widely shared with other schools. And the Pueblos were able to exercise real power in their relationships with AIS and SFIS, as did students, parents, and communities from other tribes in relation to other schools. What makes the Pueblos experience noteworthy is how, why, and to what extent they were able to modify and redirect the as-similative force of two federal boarding schools built in their own backyard.

The main agents in this story are Pueblo students, parents, and community leaders, along with the long line of men who superintended the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. Other actorsCatholic priests, officials from other schools, and East Coast expatriates, just to name a fewappear in the

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following pages, as well, as they had an effect on the power relationships be-tween the main actors.

However, for this story, the setting is just as important as the people. This story takes place in a region known to many readers as the American South-west but which has had (and still has) many other names. It unfolds largely at the periphery of the growing settler colonialism of the late-nineteenth-century American empire and far away from its center in Washington, DC, from which policy and supporting resources flowed. Thinking of the story as happening at the edge of empire, then, emphasizes the significant distance between Wash-ington and the Pueblos, the limited power the former could extend over the latter, and the historical fact that borderlands (areas on the edge, if you will) give birth to new realities, new rules for survival, and new rituals of interaction seldom envisioned by the dominant culture (in this case, the Anglo-American reformers and government personnel) before entering into such areas.

There are many different possible definitions of empire, but mine is a simple one: an empire is an entity that seeks to control for its own purposes peoples and/or areas that would otherwise exist under stable and self-organizing cul-tural and political institutions. This certainly describes the relationship be-tween the United States and the Pueblos under discussion hereindeed, the relationship between the United States and Native American peoples in general. The US government, through its various instruments, including the boarding schools, wanted nothing less than to fully incorporate Indian land and popu-lationthough sanitized of Indiannessinto the dominant American cul-tural and political landscape. To avoid using the term empire to refer to certain portions of American history is either to naively assume that Americas lofty aspirations to liberty and justice have always guided its interactions with the other, or to deny the reality of the richness of Native American cultural and political existence before encountering the American nation. At the very least, we must be willing to concede that the Indian parents and community leaders who found their cultures, beliefs, land, resources, and even their rights over their own children under threat would have had a hard time comprehending Americans professed commitment to the ideals of freedom and self-determi-nation. In describing the interactions between the Pueblos and the boarding schools discussed here, imperial does not seem too harsh a term.

Scholars of the American West and Southwest still argue about a basic bor-derlands chronology for the regionand whether or not the Southwest quali-fies as a borderland environment at any given point in the past five centuries. I am not interested in whether, or to what extent, the region itself could be con-

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sidered a borderland during the period from 1881 to 1928. What I am asserting is that the Pueblos and the superintendents experienced a borderlands environ-ment when it came to attempts by the boarding schools to assert influence and control over Pueblo children, and that this reality had a significant effect on the power relationships that developed between the various parties involved.

Because of the low priority placed by Congress on funding for boarding schools, such schools benefited little from the economic infrastructure devel-oped by and the incorporation accomplished by the United States in New Mex-ico. There were abundant local goods and resources that could have benefited the schools greatly, but limited funds with which to purchase them. There were new railroads crisscrossing the region, but the school often resorted to paying members of distant pueblos to bring their own children to the schools (as well as any others they could convince to come) rather than patronizing the railways frequently on such tight budgets. No doubt the United States produced more than enough teachers, bakers, disciplinarians, matrons, carpenters, black-smiths, and other important personnel to fulfill the needs of AIS, SFIS, and other Indian schools, but the schools could offer little enticement, financial or otherwise, to recruit the necessary bodies.

While the United States recognized no other political rival for hegemony over the Southwest, this does not mean that all inhabitants of the region ac-cepted US hegemony, nor that the United States was able to bring its full power to bear on New Mexico or the pueblos at all times. The reality is that the su-perintendents of the boarding schools had a clear, if at times vague, directive from the East, but seldom if ever had the resources or personnel necessary to carry out that directive. School personnel may have represented a more powerful entity than the Pueblo leaders, parents, and students with whom they interacted, but this seldom translated into real power or control for the schools. Superintendents negotiated, rather than dictated, conditions in the educational landscape of New Mexico. Even if this educational borderland was more conceptual than literal, it was no less real to those who dwelled therein.

After the US-Mexican War ended in 1848, no other nation-state laid claim to what is now the American Southwest, and the United States immediately began imposing various boundaries upon the region to incorporate its new southwest-ern territories. The first obvious boundary was the new international border between Mexico and the United States. Other scholars have effectively demon-strated that this boundary was largely an illusion as late as the 1920s and 1930s; even today, the porous nature of the boundary is apparent.19

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More pressing on the Pueblos and the school officials they would interact with, however, were the boundaries of a new racial hierarchy suddenly imposed on the region by the dominant Anglo-American population of the United States. One of these barriers was the obvious barrier between whites and nonwhites (one of the underpinning justifications for the existence of the boarding schools in the first place), but the new racial hierarchy also tried to create boundaries between nonwhite groups. In a region in which race had been a rather fluid concept for centuries, now one had to be Hispanic or Indian. The Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools superintendents and other officials spent tremen-dous energy worrying about the Indianness of their students (determined by blood quantum), and frequently complained about the local Hispanic popula-tion (determined by not being Indian enough to patronize the schools) try-ing to enroll their children in the two boarding schoolsafter all, the federal government had established AIS and SFIS to educate Native Americans, not Hispanics. School officials charged with ending Indianness suddenly had to decide who possessed it in the first place. As Adrea Lawrence has noted in her study of the Indian Day School at Santa Clara Pueblo in Mexico, the presence of Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American populations in the same area compli-cated the American colonial project in the Southwest.20

The final boundary affecting the relationship between the Pueblos and the federal boarding schools was the boundary between civilization and sav-agery. The Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools might have been close to the pueblos geographically, but they were worlds apart in the minds of the reformers back East who had envisioned the use of off-reservation boarding schools. It was this boundary more than any other that utterly failed to hold, and this failure had a tremendous effect on the relationships between the Pueb-los and the two schools.

One reason that the boundary failed concerned questions of citizenship. The Pueblos only briefly experienced rule by the independent country of Mexico. Their region officially became part of Mexico after independence in 1821, but by 1848 was part of the United States. During those twenty-seven years Mexico was far too busy with conflicts and struggles racking the interior of the country to worry much about its far northern frontier. The only real legacy of Mexican rule for the Pueblos was the decision by the Mexican government to disavow the Law of the Indies, a legal corpus that had governed the treatment of Native Americans in the Spanish New World empire. The Law of the Indies had defined the Pueblo townships as equal to, yet distinct from, Hispanic townships. With no Law of the Indies to distinguish them, Pueblos simply became Mexican citizens.

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One of the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US-Mexican War, stated that all Mexican citizens still living in the Southwest would automatically become citizens of the United States of America after a brief period. According to the treaty, Pueblos were now citizens, but according to political thought at the time, all Native Americans were wards of the United States, a status significantly less than citizens. This confusion over exactly how to understand and label the Pueblos had a profound effect on the power rela-tionship between the Pueblos and the boarding schools, especially early on.21

Another reason that this particular boundary failed was the ambiguous status the Pueblos held in the minds of many Americans (including many school officials). They were not fully civilized, yet they were hardly savages in the sense that Americans used this term to describe some of the other nearby tribes. Pueblos were long-settled, agricultural communities, as opposed to many of the surrounding tribes that had recently been placed on reservations. In the eyes of school personnel, Pueblos had a deep and in many ways respectable culture. Educators saw the Pueblos as having a primitive but still impressive civilization in its own rightcertainly they believed Pueblos to be superior to the surround-ing tribes, not to mention the local Hispanic population. Also, Pueblos were nominally Catholic, which federal educators saw as better than being pagan, even if most of the Protestant government personnel were not always thrilled by the presence of Catholicism among the Pueblos.22

The final reason that the boundary failed was because school officials could not easily redefine a region that their country had claimed possession of for less than a century but which their pupils communities had called home for thou-sands of years. Unlike many tribes that endured the federal boarding schools, the Pueblos still resided in their ancestral homes; they had not suffered the tragedy of relocation to new reservations. When Pueblo students attended AIS or SFIS, they did so in the midst of a landscape whose lakes, rivers, val-leys, and mountains their people had named long ago, and whose history they had passed down for generations. The United States might have hoped that incorporation and assimilation would destroy the world of the Pueblos, but in reality the Pueblos preserved that world in part by incorporating Western education and the economic resources that the schools represented into preex-isting Pueblo patterns of subsistence and methods of interacting with outsiders.

The term Pueblo needs further explanation. The Pueblos are a group of nineteen surviving Native American communities stretching across northern, central, and eastern New Mexico.23 The term Pueblo is also sometimes associated with

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the Hopi of northeastern Arizona and the community of Ysleta del Sur in Texas, though neither of these groups are part of this study. The nineteen Pueblos of New Mexico are culturally and linguistically interrelated, though each com-munity enjoys certain distinctions, as well as political independence from the others.24 The name Pueblo comes from Spanish explorers who first entered the Southwest in the mid-1500s. Impressed by the sedentary and agricultural lifestyle they encountered, they named these communities with the Spanish word for town: pueblo.

There are some difficulties in using Pueblo as a historic label. Despite shar-ing historical experiences and having cultural and linguistic affinities, the term Pueblo still encompasses nineteen distinct communities in New Mexico. There is no Pueblo language, as Pueblos speak languages from three distinct families and three different branches of one of those families.25 There is no unified set of Pueblo religious practices. Though many of the themes and general practices are similar, the organization of ceremonial life at various pueblos can look quite different. And these nineteen New Mexico communities are but the surviving members of a regional group that inhabited nearly one hundred communities at its height. Trying to speak coherently about the Pueblo historical experi-ence is somewhat akin to trying to create a unified historical narrative for all of Western Europe; thus, I have tried to be sensitive to these difficulties, noting differences between the ways various communities, and various components of those communities, responded to the same historical stimuli.

However, the term Pueblo is still useful, especially for the period under study here. First, Pueblo communities embrace a common identity. One of the most recent manifestations of this is the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, in which all nineteen communities participate. This common identity extends far back, as these communitiesand their now extinct sister communitieshad to constantly define themselves in relation to hostile out-siders, whether Navajo, Apache, Comanche, or Spanish.26 A shared identity meant not only solidarity, but at times active cooperation. The most dramatic example of this is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which the Pueblos united to drive the Spanish out of the colony of New Mexico entirely. However, when the Spanish reconquered New Mexico twelve years later, in 1692, they received many reports from captured Pueblos that the alliance between pueblos had bro-ken down soon after the expulsion of the Spanish. With their common enemy gone, it seems that each pueblo quickly returned to its independent state.27 In other words, the common Pueblo identity had its limitations, and was strongest under the shadow of external threat. Several centuries later, the presence of

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the federal boarding schools provided just such a scenario. Though there may not have been another revolt, episodes of solidarity and cooperation between pueblo communities certainly appear in the boarding school records.

Not only does the historical category referred to as Pueblo accurately re-flectwith certain nuance and limitationshow these communities would have understood themselves, but boarding school personnel also used the cat-egory in understanding these communities. Moreover, school personnel saw a difference between the Native American communities they called Pueblo and other Indian groups. The government separated Pueblo into Northern and Southern Pueblo Agencies, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reunited these into one agency in the 1930s. Zuni Pueblo also received its own agency because of its distance from the other pueblos. The BIA created such agencies for administrative convenience; there is no evidence in the boarding school records that government officials or school personnel saw any meaningful dif-ference between northern pueblos, southern pueblos, and Zuni.28

America was not the first foreign power to try to colonize and organize the Pueblos. By the time Americans arrived in the region, the Pueblos already had centuries of experience resisting, accommodating, adapting to, and confound-ing the imperial projects of the Spanish. The Spanish came to see Pueblos as the most likely converts to both Catholicism and civilization, but also the most likely source of self-enrichment in the difficult landscape of New Mexico. For nearly one hundred years after the founding of the colony of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish officials, clergy, and colonists fought for the right to claim Pueblo crops, textiles, bodies, and souls for themselves. In addition, Spanish clergy did everything in their power to stamp out what one might anachronistically call Pueblo religious life. For a people who make no distinction between the sacred and the secular, however, what was at stake was more than the rituals and ceremonies that the Spanish found offensive.29 The Spanish threatened the Pueblos ability to understand, order, and influence their world.

In 1680, the dam that held back nearly a century of Pueblo resentment toward Spanish colonialism broke. The result was a revolt so successful that the Spanish would not return in force for twelve years.30 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Spanish had been in New Mexico again for almost a decade, but things looked very different. The old tensions remained, and the Spanish were no more enamored of Pueblo beliefs and rituals than they had been, but an unspoken agreement had been reached. The Pueblos accepted the Spanish as a permanent part of their world. Other than a brief and localized uprising in 1696, the Pueblos never again rose in violence against Spain. For

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their part, the Spanish understood that their power had very real boundaries, boundaries they would have to respect. The Pueblos would take the lessons of the Spanish colonization experience with them into their encounter with the American nation.31

Anglo-Americans brought with them their own unique vision of what the Southwest could be, and the Native Americans living in the region were ini-tially little more than an afterthought. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were perceived as an impediment. Having inherited the English colonial vision of the New World as a vast virgin land, full of economic, social, and political opportunities, most Americans who crossed the Mississippi River had little use for the Native American population they encountered. While it would be a gross exaggeration to say that everyone west of the Mississippi simply wanted to kill off the Indian population, there were precious few liv-ing out West who seriously considered a future for Native Americans in the expanding nation.

Things began to change in the late 1860s with the initiation of President Ulysses S. Grants Peace Policy. Grant began to shift official policy regard-ing Native Americans away from warfare and toward other means of control and containment. This is certainly not to say that the violence and trauma ceased (most historians concur that the American Indian Wars did not end until the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890), but it was a significant turning point, nonetheless.32 In practice, Grants Peace Policy meant that religious groups came to play a significant role in the Indian Service, their members filling the roles of agents, school personnel, and other important functions. The missionary and the teacher replaced the soldier on the frontlines wher-ever the government deemed this possible. Grants Peace Policy was short-lived, but it still represented an important step in government involvement in Indian education. Peace would continue to be the rule of thumb, even as government schools and government-appointed agents began to replace their religious counterparts.

By the 1880s, the American Indian Wars were drawing to a close in the Southwest. It was in this context that the Presbyterian Board of Home Mis-sions established an off-reservation boarding school in Albuquerque in 1881 with the understanding that the federal government would take over opera-tions five years later. Nine years after the establishment of the Albuquerque In-dian School, the federal government opened another off-reservation boarding school in Santa Fe. As off-reservation boarding schools, both the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were meant to sit at the pinnacle of Indian educa-

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tion, taking in students from the day schools in the nearby pueblos, as well as from on-reservation boarding schools located at nearby agencies.33

The Albuquerque Indian School opened in the home of a local family, then moved to its permanent location in 1882, to land donated by the Albuquerque Board of Trade in hopes that the new school would foster economic growth in the area.34 Similarly, the Santa Fe Board of Trade played a prominent role in the establishment of the Santa Fe Indian School by donating land for its establishment in hopes of bringing much-needed economic growth to a city suffering from population declinethe consequence of being bypassed by the first railroad built through the region. The Santa Fe school opened with one two-story building on campus, which served as housing for both students and employees, and also contained classrooms and a cafeteria.35

In theory, both AIS and SFIS would serve as gathering places where the children of many tribes, having already benefited from attendance at the lower-level schools, would complete their educations and assimilation into the larger Anglo-American culture. Being completely cut off from the influence of home, they would perfect their English, complete their advanced studies, and gain the industrial skills necessary to transform their home communities and integrate them into the surrounding nation as part of the growing working class.

What actually happened was quite different. Part of the reason that this vision failed to materialize among the Pueblos was that the vision itself un-derwent significant transformation between 1881 and 1928the height of the Progressive Era, and the period under study here. Reformers, both inside and outside of the government, relied heavily on contemporary scientific theory while trying to understand and guide the future of Native Americans. In the 1880s scientific consensus stated that the gap between Indians and Anglos was merely cultural. The inequalities between the two groups were not necessarily inherent but rather the result of the effects of a superior and an inferior culture. Once introduced to a superior culture, the reasoning went, Native Americans would eagerly abandon their traditions and proudly take their place among the ranks of American citizens. Around the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, however, this view began to change. Reformers and educators embraced emerging scientific theories that explained the gap between whites and Indians as being racially determined. Inequalities between the two were biological and inherent. Scientists, and many of the reformers who used their theories, began to lose hope that Native Americans would ever integrate into American culture. They seemed destined to become a subclass of Americans, contributing little to the health or vibrancy of the nation, other than serving as laborers. The

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practical effect on the Indian Services schools of this shift in scientific thought was to place more emphasis on the industrial training that took place at the schoolsat the expense of classroom learning.36

By the 1920s, the pressure to assimilate Indian students by way of the schools had lessened even more, but for a different reason. Now it was not so much a matter of assimilation being impractical or perhaps impossible but increasingly immoral. A new wave of cultural appreciation and relativism was sweeping through the ranks of the reformers and slowly infecting the Indian Service as well.37 This culminated in the appointment of John Colliera vocal advocate for Indian rightsas commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.38 It was during the 1920s, when this new wave began to gain force and assimilation fervor began to wane, that the Pueblos faced some of the greatest threats to their cultural survival. The first came in the form of Charles Burke, commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1921 to 1929. Burke, an assimilationist of the old pattern, was one of a dying breed in the 1920s, but the commissioner of Indian Affairs was still a powerful office. Burke launched an all-out assault on Native religion. The Pueblos, with their entrenched and highly developed spiritual beliefs and practices, bore much of the brunt of his campaign.39 The Pueblos found sympathy and even some assistance from an unlikely source, the superintendents of the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. The second great assault on the Pueblos during this period was the Bursum Bill, which US Senator Holm Bursum proposed to Congress in 1922. Briefly stated, the Bursum Bill was an attempt by Congress to finally settle disputed land claims between Pueblos and white squatters by means that were highly unfavorable to the Pueblos. It was eventually defeated.40

Surprisingly, if one were to have visited many of the off-reservation board-ing schools west of the Mississippi in the 1880s, in the 1900s, then again in the 1920s, these shifts in scientific theory and the resulting reform agendas would not always have been noticeable. They had limited effect on Western boarding schools far from the capital. The emphasis on industrial training at the expense of classroom training was already a de facto reality at both AIS and SFIS by the early twentieth century simply as a result of limitations in resources, person-nel, and the abilities of the students. As Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder explain, This lowering of expectations [regarding the capabilities of Indian students] had little real effect on Indian education, because education at Carlisle and other Indian Schools had always been largely at an elementary level with a vocational, manual labor emphasis.41 In the end, conditions at both AIS and SFIS were slow to change, and when they did, it was more a matter of local

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influences and pressures than anything emanating from Washingtonunless, of course, it was the chronic shortage of funds and resources that failed to cross the Mississippi.

It is the power relationships that emerged from the crucible of these local in-fluences and pressures that form the core of this study. It was not simply a matter of tension between the Pueblos and the boarding schools. Neither side was wholly united in its approach to the other. The surviving records show occasional conflict among and between Pueblo leaders and parents, Pueblo parents and students, and even Pueblo students and community leaders. In addition, school superintendents had to deal with the occasional disgruntled employee, antagonistic teachers at feeder schools, and rival superintendents at off-reservation boarding schools located out of state. On top of that, govern-ment superintendents sometimes encountered significant conflict and resis-tance from the superintendents of nearby nongovernmental schools, such as Catholic mission schools. At any given time, a multiplicity of power relation-ships were being negotiated in New Mexico.

Nor was the relationship between the government schools and the pueblos always antagonistic or even unfriendly. The vast majority of superintendents and school personnel seem to have harbored genuine respect for the Pueblos, in comparison to other tribes that they encountered or of which they were aware. While few, if any, were prepared to accept Pueblos as the equals of Anglo-Americans, most saw a real difference between the settled, nominally Catholic communities of the Pueblos and the recently nomadic, pagan com-munities of other tribes.42 The destruction of Native American culture was a means to an end for the army of school officials, philanthropists, and missionar-ies that crossed the Mississippi, either in body or in spirit. They were genuinely trying to rescue people they believed to be in grave and imminent dangera doomed race. In essence, their ethnocentrism led them to believe that the path to salvation necessarily included the destruction of Indian culture.

For their part, Pueblo communities, parents, and students often saw some-thing useful in the schools. Some saw the schools as an opportunity to teach children how to effectively engage the encroaching Anglo-American population, while still maintaining enough contact with home not to forget who they were. Frank Tenorio (AIS 193339) recalled the sorts of things that Pueblo parents told their children before sending them to AIS or SFIS: We are going to let you be at this certain place under the care of so and so. And I know youll be taken care of. And whatever they prescribe for you, be willing to learn, because you are there

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solely for the purpose of learning.43 There seems to have been a real sense on the part of Pueblo leaders and parents that their children needed to learn to live in both worldsnot because the white world was better, but simply because it was not going away. Scholars writing about other boarding schools have discovered that Native American parents from other tribes could be just as eager for their children to attend government schools for similar reasons.44

At times communities, parents, and children saw the schools as a new bounty of resources, and in such a limited landscape all possible resources should be incorporated. The schools represented new opportunities for employ-ment, such as working as carpenters, providing firewood, or carrying freight from the railway station. The industrial skills taught in the schools could pro-vide students with new means to make money to support their home commu-nities, or even new services to provide directly to those same communities. At other times the school might represent a solution for a community or family with too many children or with orphans to care for.45 Rarely, the schools (es-pecially through their work outing opportunities) could mean a temporary or permanent departure from home for a student who, for whatever reason, did not wish to stay involved in the community. In truth, the Pueblos as a whole did not merely resist or accommodate the boarding schools. They never did, and never have, relinquished their right to shape their children, and through them, their world. Sometimes this meant opposing the boarding schools, but it could also mean using them for their own purposes.

The Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were both significant educa-tional institutions that influenced a vast multitude of students and many com-munities. At the height of the period, AIS enrolled over one thousand students per year, and SFIS peaked at over six hundred per year. In addition, these two schools were some of the longest-lasting boarding schools, surviving the signifi-cant number of closings from the 1930s to the 1950s. In fact, the Albuquerque Indian School became the first former government boarding school to become a tribally run institution when the Pueblos assumed ownership of the school in 1976.46 The Pueblos took responsibility for the Santa Fe Indian School not long after. The Albuquerque Indian School continued to operate as a Pueblo-run school until the mid-1980s, when the continued deterioration of the campus led to its closing. The Santa Fe Indian School continues to operate today, as a high school for Indian students, the majority of whom are Pueblo.47

This is not an institutional study, per say. Instead, this book focuses on the power relationships that developed between the Pueblos, the boarding schools,

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and other actors that entered into or influenced those direct relationships. What this means is that topics of interest in more traditional case studies, such as lengthy histories about the founding of the schools, in-depth narratives regard-ing the various years in which the campuses expanded or certain buildings appeared, and the accomplishments of the various sports teams do not receive a great deal of emphasis here. They are mentioned only when they bear on the larger relationships of interest to this study.48

In addition, this book has a multi-institutional focus and examines the ex-periences of the Pueblos with several institutions. Individual boarding schools make sense as units of historical study, but many Native American tribes (and sometimes even individual communities) sent members to multiple off-reser-vation boarding schools. A significant number of Pueblos (mostly from Laguna Pueblo) were in the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools first recruiting class. Pueblos also attended Phoenix, Haskell, and Riverside Indian Schools, though in relatively small numbers. However, once opened, the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools accounted for the vast majority of Pueblo childrens experi-ence with government boarding schools, which is why it is reasonable to limit the study to these two institutions. There is also the obvious fact that AIS and SFIS were located close to the Pueblos, while the other schools were not.

The specific story of the interaction between these schools and the Pueblo communities of New Mexico offers rich and important analysis because of the historical experiences of the Pueblos themselves. By the time American boarding schools arrived, the Pueblos already had extensive experience with the pressures of assimilation from the Spanish. These communities were also remarkably stable. In comparison to many other tribes that encountered fed-eral and mission boarding schools, Pueblos existed within a social and cultural framework, and lived on land that they had occupied for centuriesa land to which they assigned meaning and from which they drew meaning, as well.49 The presence of several nearby competing Catholic and government boarding schools often gave the Pueblos unexpected leverage in light of the general des-peration for funds and students experienced by most boarding schools. What all of this means is that the Pueblo experience with the Santa Fe and Albuquerque Indian Schools is a meaningful story worth knowing in its own right, but also one offering invaluable insight and nuance as scholars continue the work of understanding the boarding school experience as a whole, as well as within the context of similar experiences for oppressed groups around the globe.50

Much of the research for this study rests upon the solid foundation of the bulky correspondence produced by AIS and SFIS officials themselves. The su-

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perintendents of AIS and SFIS produced reams of paperwork in the course of fulfilling their duties. There are letters between commissioner of Indian Affairs and other government personnel, between superintendents and school employ-ees, and between parents and students. This correspondence provides valuable insights not only into the running of the schools themselves but also into their intricate relationships with outside historical actors, such as students, parents, and community leaders. The vital and necessary contribution of oral history has been recognized in recent years, but this does not mean that government records are not also important to the history of Indian education. Authentic Indian voices are heard in the myriad letters from parents, students, and com-munity leaders that fill the records. Sometimes we have only the response of school officials, the original letters being lost, but even these responses give important insights into the interests and concerns of Native American persons and communities. Although the dangers of the biases and limitations of non-native sources are well known, there is still much that, with a little care, the discerning scholar can glean from such sources.51

Fortunately, there are additional avenues for hearing from the students who attended the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. Sally Hyer and then-current SFIS students conducted a large number of interviews with former AIS and SFIS students and employees in the 1990s, the transcripts of which are now housed at the University of New Mexico as a collection titled Santa Fe Indian School: The First Hundred Years.52 The access to student memories and perspectives in these interviews is invaluable. Finally, other records, such as newspaper articles, family papers, and personal diaries, help flesh out our understanding of the early years of AIS and SFIS.

This study begins in roughly 1881 and ends in roughly 1928. In 1881 the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions opened the Albuquerque Indian School, though under a different name. The school became a federally run boarding school in 1886, per arrangement between the Presbyterians and the govern-ment, when the former agreed to open the school. The federal government directly opened the Santa Fe Indian School in 1890. The study ends around 1928 because this is the year that the famous Meriam Report was published. This report, conducted by a joint panel of government officials and reformers, examined the federal schooling system for Native Americans as a whole and found the system severely lacking. In short, the report significantly changed the face of Indian education (though certainly not all at once). This is why most studies of Indian education adopt the Meriam Report as either their starting or ending point. The historical event of the report basically divides the history of

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Indian education in government boarding schools into part one (through 1928) and part two (1928 to the present), each part being its own story, to be under-stood on its own termsthough, again, drawing an absolute and unyielding dividing line in Indian education at 1928 is not appropriate.

Although the narrative of this study stops at the Meriam Report, some of the sources, stories, and themes of this study actually run well into the 1930s. One reason is the dearth of pre-1930s records for the Albuquerque Indian School. A fire on the AIS campus in 1910 destroyed many of its records. A series of fires on the abandoned AIS campus during the 1980s destroyed even more records. So there is little left of the copious official records produced by school personnel during its lifetime, but what is left is incredibly insightful. Records from the 1930s provide invaluable insight and interpretive aid for understanding what happened at the school in the previous decades. Of course, there is the danger that every historian faces in reading back in time from the findings of a later period, but the danger here is not as great as might be imagined, despite the watershed moment of the Meriam Report. Like everything else that emanated from Washington, it took time for the effect of the report to make its way across the Mississippi and into New Mexico.

My other reason for using sources from the 1930s is the simple fact that most historical narratives and phenomena do not end as abruptly or neatly as we might like. Some of the stories and themes I trace in this study find their natural conclusion, or at least end more neatly, in the 1930s. As the stories bleed across the artificial barrier of 1928, I follow them.

Ultimately, the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were not merely something that happened to the Pueblos, but also something that they pro-foundly shaped. We must remember that the Pueblos did not encounter educa-tion in a pure or generic form when the federal government created AIS and SFIS. Instead, they encountered a specific model of education designed to in-doctrinate and assimilate their children as productive members of a specific so-ciety. Indian education historian Margaret Connell-Szasz explains it well when she says, The Indians system of values was expressed in the education of his children and in his attitude toward the land. Consequently, the assimilationists chose to attack these two concepts as the major targets of their campaign.53

The value of education itself was never up for debate in the power relation-ships that developed between the Pueblos and the two boarding schools. What was at stake in the minds of Pueblo parents, community leaders, and even students was the value of an alien education model, with its alien methods that

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passed on new kinds of knowledge designed to incorporate them into a new world. Pueblo parents, like all Native American parentsindeed, like parents everywheretaught their children those things that they believed were neces-sary to survive and thrive in the world. Superintendents sometimes bemoaned the fact that resistant parents and communities simply did not want their chil-dren educated, that they wanted them to remain ignorant and backward. In-stead, we see that parents and communities were constantly evaluating and reevaluating just how permanent this new Anglo-American presence would be, and just how safe and profitable it was to expose their children to it in preparation for living in the midst of it. Not all communities and parents came to the same conclusions, nor were such conclusions immune to reassessment from time to time.

The Pueblos, like all Native American groups, face the ever-present chal-lenge of teaching each new generation of children how to navigate competing claims upon their lives and their communities. May this book serve as a re-minder that during this chapter of their history, the Pueblos did so, brilliantly.

a note on sPellinG and names

I capitalize Pueblo when referring to people, or when using the word as an ad-jective. I use pueblo when referring to an actual community, unless I am calling it by its proper name, such as Taos Pueblo.

In addition, several Indian tribes and communities use names for them-selves that may not be familiar to some readers, and which do not appear in the boarding school records. The Tohono Oodham of southern Arizona and northern Mexico maybe be known as the Papago to some readers, a name given to them by Spanish conquistadors and used by boarding school officials. In 2005, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo officially began to use its pre-Spanish name once again, but readers may know it as San Juan Pueblo. I use Tohono Oodham and Ohkay Owingeh in the text that follows.

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