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N E G O T I AT I N G P U E B L O I D E N T I T Y I N N E W M E X I C O S I N D I A N B OA R D I N G S C H O O L S

John R. Gram teaches at Southern

Methodist University.

Education at the Edge of Empire

Greatly expanding our understanding of

the Indian boarding school experience,
Education at the Edge of Empire is
grounded in previously overlooked archival material and student oral histories.
The result is a groundbreaking examination 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.

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 acculturating them to white society. However,
as historian John Gram reveals, some
Indian communities on the edge of the
American frontier had a much different
experienceeven influencing the type of
education their children received.

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Gram offers a highly engaging account of Pueblo Indian students and their experiences at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian schools. His book reveals an intense
power dynamic between parents, school officials, the Catholic church, and the
students themselves. No other single scholarly work interrogates the ways Pueblo
students and their tribal communities experienced these institutions.

Gram

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at the

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 efforts 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

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

ISBN 978-0-295-99477-2

University of Washington Press

Seattle and London
www.washington.edu/uwpress

of

Negotiating Pueblo Identity

in New Mexicos Indian
Boarding Schools
John R. Gram

Shining a spotlight on Pueblo Indians

interactions with school officials at the
Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools,
Gram examines two rare cases of off-reservation 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 officials 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 efforts and assured the
various pueblos cultural, social, and
economic survival.

Foreword by Theodore Jojola

the Albuquerque Indian School, National Archives and Records

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

(continued on back flap)

Charlotte Cot, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert,

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and Coll Thrush, Series Editors

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Education at the
Edge of Empire
W

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Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexicos

J o hn R . Gr am

Foreword by Thodore Jojola

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Indian Boarding Schools

U n i v er sit y of Washin gton Pr e ss

Seattle and London

 2015 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Charter, a typeface designed by Matthew Carter
18171615 54321

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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.

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Uni v e r si ty of Was hi n gton P r e s s

www.washington.edu/uwpress

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

IS BN 978-0-295-99477-2

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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, a ns i z 39.481984.

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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.

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Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price, 1881

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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

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List of Illustrationsxi
Forewordxiii
Acknowledgmentsxvii

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In t roduc t ion
Eastern Reforms Encounter Southwestern Communities
3

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Chap t e r 1
The Economics of Education:
The True Cost of Keeping the Doors Open
23

Chap t er 2
The Consequences of Competition:
The Fight to Control the Flow of Pueblo Students
57
Cha p t er 3
Geographies of Imagination:
Competing Understandings of People and Place in the Southwest
83

Cha p t er 4
Everyday Encounters:
Daily Life at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools
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Cha p t er 5
The Integration of Worlds:
What Students and Their Communities Made
of the Boarding School Experience
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C on clusion
The Successful Legacy of Assimilations Failure
171

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Appendix177
Notes201
Bibliography231
Index239

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Illustrations

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Figures

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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 36

1.2. Santa Fe Indian School Enrollment by Year 37
1.3. Albuquerque Indian School Enrollment by Grade 53
1.4. Santa Fe Indian School Enrollment by Grade 53
3.1. Individual Runaways in SFIS Records 100
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3.2. Individual Runaways in AIS Records 102

4.1. Daily Routine for Santa Fe Indian School, 191112 School Year 115
4.2. Daily Routine for Albuquerque Indian School, 191314 School Year 115
4.3. Students Participating in the Outing System at AIS and SFIS 123
4.4. Reported Significant Disease Outbreaks at AIS and SFIS 133
4.5. Limited Santa Fe Indian School Hospital Records 134
5.1. Employment of Returned Students from AIS and SFIS 165

Foreword

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Theodore Jojola

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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 estimated 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 transferred to US government control in 1886. Education was met through religious
and military indoctrination by a system exemplified at the Carlisle Indian Industrial 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 superintendent, 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. Under 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 crossassimilation 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 construction 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 military 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 silversmithing. 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 highest 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 students.
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 community. 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 inadequacy 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, enrollment 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 records, 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 gymnasium
burned 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 tantalizing 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.

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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

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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 critical 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. Clements Center for Southwest Studies on campus. Among its many benefits, the
center affords students tremendous opportunities to engage top-notch scholars 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 Denverespecially 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 University 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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Introduction

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Eastern Reforms Encounter

Southwestern Communities

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A small pamphlet published by t he 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, peoples 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 underwent 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 Native American population gained permanent ascendancy.4 Armed with contemporary 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 governmentrun 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 assimilating 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 involvement 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 personnel 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 (usually 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 psychological assault designed to recreate them in the image of the dominant AngloAmerican 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 abandoned 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 assimilate 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 children dressed in the pseudomilitary uniforms provided by boarding schools
who 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. McCarty 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 relations 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 Albuquerque 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 communities. 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 proximity 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 assure the various pueblos cultural, social, and economic survival.
The failure of these two schools to assimilate Indian communities by educating their children is not surprising. The existing literature confirms that, based
on the federal governments goal of assimilation, the boarding school experience as a whole was a failure for numerous reasons. Many scholars have conducted 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 particular, 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 envisioned 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 independent 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 responsibilities 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 assimilative 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 between 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 Southwest 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 Washington 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 cultural and political institutions. This certainly describes the relationship between 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 populationthough sanitized of Indiannessinto the dominant American cultural 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-determination. 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 borderlands chronology for the regionand whether or not the Southwest qualifies 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 environment 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 developed by and the incorporation accomplished by the United States in New Mexico. 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, blacksmiths, 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 accepted 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 superintendents 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 southwestern territories. The first obvious boundary was the new international border
between Mexico and the United States. Other scholars have effectively demonstrated 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 tremendous energy worrying about the Indianness of their students (determined by
blood quantum), and frequently complained about the local Hispanic population (determined by not being Indian enough to patronize the schools) trying 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 complicated 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 savagery. 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 Pueblos 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 relationship 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 surrounding 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 thousands 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, valleys, 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 preexisting 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 community 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 sharing 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 experience 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 outsiders, 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 broken 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 reflectwith certain nuance and limitationshow these communities would
have understood themselves, but boarding school personnel also used the category 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 difference 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 confounding 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 initially 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 living 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 regarding 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 wherever the government deemed this possible. Grants Peace Policy was shortlived, 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 Missions established an off-reservation boarding school in Albuquerque in 1881
with the understanding that the federal government would take over operations five years later. Nine years after the establishment of the Albuquerque Indian 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 lowerlevel 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 underwent 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 century, 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 boarding 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, personnel, 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.

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It is the power relationships that emerged from the crucible of these local influences 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, government superintendents sometimes encountered significant conflict and resistance from the superintendents of nearby nongovernmental schools, such as
Catholic mission schools. At any given time, a multiplicity of power relationships 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 communities of other tribes.42 The destruction of Native American culture was a
means to an end for the army of school officials, philanthropists, and missionaries 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 something 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 employment, such as working as carpenters, providing firewood, or carrying freight
from the railway station. The industrial skills taught in the schools could provide students with new means to make money to support their home communities, 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 (especially 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 educational institutions that influenced a vast multitude of students and many communities. 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 significant 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 regarding 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 experiences 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-reservation 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 experience 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 federal 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 desperation 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 employees, 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 community 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 nonnative 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 government, 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 understood 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.

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Ultimately, the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were not merely
something that happened to the Pueblos, but also something that they profoundly shaped. We must remember that the Pueblos did not encounter education in a pure or generic form when the federal government created AIS and
SFIS. Instead, they encountered a specific model of education designed to indoctrinate and assimilate their children as productive members of a specific society. 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 relationships 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 necessary to survive and thrive in the world. Superintendents sometimes bemoaned
the fact that resistant parents and communities simply did not want their children educated, that they wanted them to remain ignorant and backward. Instead, 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 challenge of teaching each new generation of children how to navigate competing
claims upon their lives and their communities. May this book serve as a reminder that during this chapter of their history, the Pueblos did so, brilliantly.

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A Note on Spelling and Names

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I capitalize Pueblo when referring to people, or when using the word as an adjective. 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 themselves 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.