Most of the students at Santa Fe Indian School came from the Rio Grande pueblos near Santa Fe, and so families rode into town on wagons to visit their children on weekends. However, Quincy Tahoma’s adoptive family was far away in Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. They never came all the way to Santa Fe to see him, and he began telling people that he did not have a family. While he had not been raised by his own mother and his father was dead, that story was partially true, like many of the life details that Tahoma invented over the years.
However, when he was a young boy, he missed the Navajo ways. At the end of fourth grade, Tahoma asked to go home for the summer. We found official correspondence in the National Archives with all of his school records and the heart-breaking exchange between the principal at SFIS and the Superintendent of the Western Navajo Indian Agency, discussing Tahoma (whose name they weren’t even sure of). The bottom line was that he had not been away from home long enough–he had been at SFIS a year, after a year in Albuquerque–to get a government-paid trip home, although he could make the trip on his own money if he wished. Of course he had no money.
That summer probably began his withdrawal from life on the reservation and his immersion in non-Indian culture…and the story that he did not have a family.
If this is your first visit to Tahoma Blog, you might want to take a look at the post that explains the publication of our book about Quincy Tahoma. Other articles about SFIS: Tahoma the Jock, the National Archives records,
Did you know that children in government boarding schools were not given money to get home, even when they did not have their own? Anything else that you know about boarding schools that we might not know?
