SFIS impacted by Indian education's harsh roots
8/10/2008
Theories on American Indian education have evolved since the late 19th century, when 25 off-reservation boarding schools were started in 15 states. Here is a chronology of that evolution and how it affected Santa Fe Indian School:
In 1879: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who advocated strict military discipline, segregation by gender and rote memorization. English was the only language allowed; children were punished for speaking their native languages. "Kill the Indian to save the man" was the theory for complete assimilation or "Americanization."
In 1885: Congress appropriated $25,000 for construction of the Santa Fe Indian School on the condition that locals donate at least 100 acres, according to a history compiled for the state Historic Preservation Office. The Santa Fe Board of Trade soon obtained 132 acres in nine long, narrow strips from Cerrillos Road downhill to the Acequia de los Pinos.
The first building — a two-story brick, pitched-roof structure with a main building and two long wings — was completed in 1890. Classes initially went only to the eighth grade, although students' ages ranged from 5 to 20, according to the history. When school was out, boys were sent to work in Albuquerque's woolen mills; girls often became domestic maids in Santa Fe homes. "In 1904, forty students spent the summer working in the sugar beet fields in Colorado," says the history.
In 1928: Indian educational theories began to change when a Brookings Institute study reported that these off-reservation schools were overcrowded and children were undernourished and overworked. The report advocated making the schools fit the needs of the students. Over the next 13 years, the number of Indian boarding schools fell from 77 to 49, and the combined enrollment fell by a third.
In 1933: President Franklin Roosevelt appointed reformer John Collier as commissioner of Indian Affairs. "Collier was convinced that the community of life of preindustrial societies held the answer to social disintegration of modern life," says the history. "Under Collier, the severe assimilationist educational policy of the past forty years finally came to an end."
American Indian art had been recognized even in Pratt's day. But by the 1920s, Santa Fe intellectuals were pushing to cultivate artistic talent at the Santa Fe Indian School. In 1932, Dorothy Dunn, a Kansas native and Art Institute of Chicago graduate, was hired to teach painting at the school. Because there was no official position for an art instructor, her title was "laborer."
In 1936: John Gaw Meem, dean of Santa Fe architecture, was hired as part of a New Deal program to remodel the campus buildings in a Spanish Pueblo Revival style. "There is the unquestioning cultural benefit to the Indians themselves in recognizing a style that is their own, and surrounding the pupils with a congenial and accustomed architecture, rather than the gloomy barracks-like structures they are now in," he wrote.
In 1956: Congress deeded two tracts on the southwest corner of the campus, then run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, to the city of Santa Fe for a fire station and Ashbaugh Park. A third tract on the southern edge was transferred to the U.S. Public Health Service for the Santa Fe Indian Hospital.
In 1962: The Institute of American Indian Arts, then a two-year junior college, began operating on the Santa Fe Indian School campus. Not until the year 2000, after years of sharing the College of Santa Fe campus, did the IAIA move into its own campus on Richards Avenue, south of Santa Fe.
In 2006: The school opened $31 million worth of new dorms, classrooms and an activity center behind the older buildings. The demolition makes the new campus more visible from Cerrillos Road.
The changes made in Indian education in the 1930s apparently influenced today's administration's decisions on the recent demolition — that along with the high cost of remodeling century-old buildings.