This post by Vera Marie
Perhaps the most controversial part of our book will be our treatment of American Indian boarding schools.
While we acknowledge that the boarding schools were disruptive and damaging to American Indian youth when they were created, the administration of those schools had changed by the time Tahoma was in fifth grade.
We based our description of life in the Santa Fe Indian School on the testimony of people who had attended school there about the same time that Tahoma did. When Tahoma was whisked away from his native Tuba City first to Albuquerque Indian School and then quickly to Santa Fe Indian School, the system was despicable. Children were not permitted to speak their native language. Long hair was cut against the wishes of the children. They were marched from place to place in military style. And generally, the objective was to remove any “Indian” from them and turn them into non-Indians.
By the 1930s, a progressive movement in the federal government, pushed along by reformers in Santa Fe, began to mold a system that showed more respect for the individual student. That all happened just after the impressionable young Quincy Tahoma was shifted from Albuquerque to Santa Fe Indian School.The rules were softening, and as he grew up at SFIS, he was able to speak Navajo outside of class and the school had regular events with dances and feasts for the various Pueblo, Navajo and other cultures represented.
So although the beginning of his life in boarding school was tough, his schoolmates looked back fondly on their experiences, particularly in high school. Tahoma was weaned away form the reservation, but he had already been separated from his birth mother and claimed not to have any family at all. And he certainly would not have been able to develop his talent in painting had he stayed on the sheep camp where he grew up. The paintings also gave him some financial freedom, as he was allowed to sell them in the school store that teacher Dorothy Dunn set up.
We believe that it is incorrect to assume that boarding school was always a bad experience. The testimony of students at SFIS during the 1930s contradicts that assumption. (See the First One Hundred Years Project at the University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research.)
