Only a bronze plaque planted flat in the ground indicated that there were bodies of children from the old Albuquerque Indian School beneath it, and the plaque disappeared two years ago.
The city of Albuquerque is now trying, with the help of Indian groups, to sensitively honor the presence of the children who died during their closed federal boarding school and are buried in 4-H Park.
Mayor Tim Keller said in a press release that there is a global awakening to “how damaging these efforts have been to remove Native American children from their families for inclusion in boarding schools.” In the years that followed this tragic era, the city should have done better, “to appreciate the importance of this site in harmony with the Native American community.”
The situation points to the attention paid to hidden graves from Aboriginal boarding schools that year. Following the discovery of many such graves in Canada, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, promised to review the situation in the United States in June.
Haaland said her department will “address the intergenerational influence of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken trauma of the past, no matter how difficult it is.”
It is about unmarked graves as well as a broader consideration of the complicated history of aboriginal boarding schools. Although the practice of taking children to “humanize” or “Americanize” them now seems barbaric, some of the schools have turned into solid institutions that valued native cultures and still enroll students today.
Santa Fe has a long history of boarding schools. The Santa Fe Indian School on Cerrillos Road continues to thrive. Two others – the Ramona Indian School and the St. Catherine Indian School – have long been inactive.
Some have speculated that children’s bodies might be buried on the school grounds in Santa Fe, but to date no evidence has been presented by either historians or investigators. The proposal baffles some who have attended native schools in Santa Fe and remember their time with fondness.
Chris Humetewa, a freshman at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, said he loved his years at Santa Fe Indian School. Humetewa, who is descended from Kewa Pueblo and San Felipe Pueblo, ran cross-country skiing and cross-country skiing there, learned his mother tongue, researched the history of the school and its people and enjoyed traditional food and festivals.
He said the school, which began as a federal boarding school in 1890 and is now run by the 19 pueblos of New Mexico, has “turned the table” and has become a place where the goal is not to “assimilate” children helping them see themselves and their home past with pride.
“It’s been a very positive experience for me,” he said last week. “It was really great.”
Still, he said, there might be an unmarked grave there. “It almost has to exist,” he said. “I’ve heard rumors, yes.”
Gary Lujan, the school’s director of Trust Land Management, said in an email that when tribal leaders took control of the school, tribal leaders “began the healing process privately in a way culturally appropriate to our communities.” He said the school supported Haaland’s efforts but declined to comment.
Danny Suazo, who graduated from Santa Fe Indian School in 1985, said his father and grandfather also went to school. Suazo, who is from Taos Pueblo and is now an academic advisor at Santa Fe Community College, said he had never heard of unmarked graves.
Suazo said it was difficult to hide graves there as the school was built over the years.
A small nuns cemetery at the disused St. Catherine Indian School also raises the question of whether children are buried anywhere on campus.
Ed Romero, whose Santa Fe Civil Housing Authority now owns the property, said he did not hear any unmarked graves there.
However, others have suspicions.
Jean Marquardt, who was president of St. Catherine – a fundraising position – for two years in the mid-1990s said she believed there were bodies of children there.
“I’m just guessing,” said Marquardt, who now lives in California. “We just don’t know who and we don’t know where.”
Marquardt added, “The Catholic Church has a history of cover-up, and the nuns have been a part of it.”
A 1980 article in Pueblo News quoted Sister Adele Snyder of St. Catherine as saying that sooner there would be “an epidemic or disease outbreak and we have lost some of our students. The sisters kept their bodies in tombs underneath. ” one of the buildings … to show the parents proof that they really died and that they are not going to hide it. “
But Sister Patrick Marie Dempsey, who worked at St. Catherine for 23 years, said she did not know what Snyder was talking about and she knew nothing about bodies.
“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Dempsey, 86, said of both claims. “I have no inside knowledge.” She added that she had no idea why Marquardt would make such remarks.
Mary Sarracino of Laguna Pueblo visited and lived in St. Catherine in the late 1960s and early 1970s but left when her boyfriend was kicked out for fighting for her.
Sarracino said she enjoyed going to school with children from many different pueblos and found it to be a good academic environment. But the nuns there were strict.
“Everything was a sin,” she said. “That’s how they kept you under control.”
She said Haaland’s initiative is important, but she doesn’t know of any children buried on the 18-acre campus. Students went home when they were seriously ill, she said.
Sarracino has a master’s degree in social work, worked for the Albuquerque Public Schools and is now retired.
She said she was discouraged from learning the language of her people, “and our beliefs have always been crushed. … It gives you a guilty conscience. “
The third school in the Santa Fe area, the Ramona Indian School, existed for about 10 years in the late 19th century and had buildings near Don Gaspar Avenue and Coronado Road. The school is nowhere to be seen, and most of the neighborhood’s residents have never heard of it.
One resident, Steven Trujillo, said he had lived in the neighborhood for about 50 years and knew there was a school there. To the corpses below, Trujillo said: “I’ve never heard that as a legend.”
Santa Fe archaeologist Alysia Abbott, who studies unmarked and forgotten tombs in the area, called Ramona “a kind of lost Santa Fe Indian school”. The school was the brainchild of an Easterner named Horatio Ladd and was run for a short time.
“They were rough hills,” Abbott said of the school grounds in the late 19th century. “They were way out of town.”
Abbott looked down the block on Coronado Road and said of the bodies, “They’re here somewhere.” However, she added that if they were ever there, they might have been removed at some point.
A quarterly publication from the Ramona School stated at the time: “Girls of these pagan tribes will … and, by written contract with their parents … reservation.”
The harsh treatment of Native American children at the national level was challenged in a 1928 state investigation called the Meriam Report. The care of Indian children in boarding schools is “grossly inadequate,” says the report.
They cited generally poor nutrition, strict discipline, overcrowding in dormitories, unsatisfactory medical care, unfair use of student work and poor professional training that leads to poor opportunities.
Scientists cite the Meriam Report as a key element in the slow transformation of boarding schools into institutions that do more than coerce and bully Aboriginal children.
In Albuquerque, the city government tribal association said he only contacted Haaland’s team last week. Terry Sloan said he doesn’t know if this team will be making site visits, but they intend to report back to Haaland next spring and continue working after that.
Sloan, who is Hopi and Navajo, called Haaland a friend and said he hoped to meet with the team in December, maybe from Zoom.
He said Haaland’s staff at the initiative wanted to collect “as much detail and analysis as possible” on hidden tombs and Indian boarding schools in general.
The city of Albuquerque had no control over the school, which went out of business in the early 1980s. But it has a 4-H park where the children are buried. The city wants to treat the hidden cemetery as a holy place, Sloan said.
He said there could be 75 to 100 bodies there, but ground penetrating radar technology has not yet been used to get the number. Some are likely school staff, he said, and some could be from a hospital that was operating nearby at one time.
The city wants to pay due tribute to those buried there, he said, and has heard from four tribes. “And it will be very delicate and delicate work,” he said, because some indigenous cultures do not want to disturb the graves and others want to move the bodies.
“It varies, and it will vary what they want based on the tribe and culture,” he said.
Sarracino, who lives in Paguate on the Laguna Reservation, said her father attended the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and he didn’t want her to speak the Laguna language. He argued that it had no value in the culture she had adopted and that it would only bring her into trouble.
When you’re “programmed” against your own culture, “it takes a lot for you,” she said. This society requires Native Americans to “be beggars all the time. But it’s not that we are beggars. They left us nothing.”
Sarracino tries to claim something from what she lost or never had. She is learning the Laguna language.
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