Here, Now and Always Exhibition
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Edmund J. Ladd, Zuni Pueblo
Michael Lacapa, Apache/Hopi/TewaThe Navajo-Hopi land dispute is a story of the Hopis’ and Navajos’ claims to ancient rights to the land of their forefathers. Our grandmas said that the Hopi came out of the earth from the Sipapu (earth navel). It is where the Little Colorado River and the Colorado River come together. It is where man emerged into the fourth world. My uncles speak of how the U.S. government is drawing new lines so the Navajos can use the land. Our grandpa said, “Let the government have it. They will use it up, and when they feel that the land is no longer any use to them they will leave.” It is the Hopi understanding that many will come to try and claim what is Hopi, but in the end the Hopi will still be here, a place near the Sipapu, a place we call home. Have you heard of the war in America’s Southwest? It is a war for water. Much has been written about the struggles between tribal groups prior to Columbus, and much has been documented about the conflicts between the Spanish and Apache. But the opponents in this battle are Arizona’s Salt River Project, a lifeline to the Phoenix metro area, and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, first users of the water. It is a war with yet no victor but with many losers. Leigh J. (Jenkins) Kuwanwisiwma, Hopi
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Tessie Naranjo, Santa Clara PuebloBy the time the Americans arrived in the Southwest in the mid-1840s, the Spanish had been here for 300 years. American traders took away resources such as turquoise, piñon nuts, seeds, and animal skins. By the end of the 1800s, archaeologists and photographers had gone into every Pueblo village. They were curious about our past. About the same time, the United States government forced changes in our religion and education. Boarding schools removed children from their homes and communities. Despite these attempts, Southwest tribal cultures have survived. As survivors, we use those non-traditional ways that we wish and keep out those that we don’t like. Like all modern people, we Pueblos have been shaped by our history. Often I feel uncomfortable with the necessity of conforming to Western cultural standards. Whenever I feel the need to retreat, the safety and comfort of my community is where I go to find myself again. Rex Lee Jim, Diné (Navajo)
Gloria Emerson, Diné (Navajo)
Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, Jicarilla ApacheGeneral Kearney’s entry into New Mexico in 1846 brought decades of warfare, settlement on reservations, religious intolerance, economic deprivation, and psychological despair to Indian peoples. Our ancestors were forced to give up their lands and way of life for a position on the lower rungs of American society. The eventual payoff after assimilation and acculturation was participation in the American dream. By relying on their inner strength; by believing in the foundations of their societies that promoted family, sharing, prayers, hope; and by never giving up, Indian people survived the experience of conquest. Today, nineteen Pueblos, two Apache tribes and a portion of the Navajo Nation are located on over eight million acres of New Mexico with an ever-growing population and increasing economic might. |
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Text from the Survival Writers Video |
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Jeri Ah-Be-HillWhen I first went to Riverside Indian School I was only in the sixth grade and I was so lonely. It was so lonely. And then I would cry. Oh my goodness, I would just cry my eyeballs out because I couldn’t stand it. And then there were a lot of other little girls there that were crying too, and so we would all cry together. Then it was really interesting as you made friends and got to know some of the matrons and the teachers, you love the place because they were good people. When I got to Riverside, one of the things, the first thing that they asked you to do was to select a religion. I grew up Indian, you know, I grew up with traditional Indian ways and they said, “You have to go to one of these churches” and I said, “Okay, well, I’ll go to the Native American Church because that’s what my family…” and this girls’ advisor said, “No, No, we don’t have such a thing as that, you have to go to one of these churches: a Baptist, Methodist, Mormon, Catholic, and so forth.” So I didn’t know any of them and the one that seemed to be the most popular was this Baptist, Southern Baptist, so that’s where I went the first year and believe you me, after the first year I selected another religion, which was Methodist because they went on picnics and they dumped you in water and baptized you, and all that kind of fun stuff. I did that the next year but then when I got to be towards the Junior and Senior then I decided to become a Catholic, because for some reason those Catholics really kind of intrigued me and they were real strict and that kind of appealed to me. But, I didn’t like a lot of things about them either because there were times when they would say things like, “Everybody that isn’t a Catholic will go to hell,” and I kept thinking, “You mean my best friend Gloria Kaulity is gonna go to hell because she’s Methodist and I’m Catholic?” You know, I kind of had a hard time dealing with them. Of course, now, I hear the Catholics have a different philosophy and a lot of things change as time goes by. But at that time. I must say, today, I’ve gone back to my Indian religion which is the sweats and the Native American Church and then also the Sundance; when I can, I still attend those. The other thing that they did was in these cottages, to give us more of a cottage life, they didn’t have just all seniors in one cottage, they put different age groups and it was a good way to do it because that way you felt more at home because most of us had brothers and sisters at home or maybe older brothers and sisters, so everybody felt more comfortable with that. At the school, we got up every morning at 6:00, did our duties, and 9:00 we were in bed, lights out. Now, I did that until the day I graduated from high school. Here I was a grown young woman and I was still going to bed at 9:00, and it was light outside but those were the rules. In the ’40s, when I first went to school, we did wear uniforms and I’ll never forget it. They were the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in my life. They were little calico dresses, and they were all made exactly alike. And then the shoes, that was it, they were these ugly, ugly bullhides, we used to call them bullhides, that was the name of them. Did you get your bullhides today? Yes I got my bullhides. And they came in, I think they only came in black but they were the ugliest shoes. And do you know, that same shoe is being made today and they’re really stylish, and that’s what my daughter wears with real fancy dresses and goes to parties like that. Can you believe that? And they cost alot of money. I used to wear those when I was in the sixth grade and went to Riverside Indian School. Go figure! Do you know what it feels like to have your hair soaked in kerosene? That’s what they did to us, to all of us. Only one kid would bring lice from home and we’d all have to pay by having our hair doused. And of course all of us had long, thick hair; oh it was awful. You’d have that smell no matter what. Your hair was doused, you’d shampoo it everyday and you could still…And then besides not only smelling, your hair would look awful looking. I mean those little funny little dresses they made you wear, those bullhides which were so unattractive, and then there’s your hair, you know, kerosene. No wonder we were depressed! Sunday it was our big meal. We always had either a pork roast or we had a roast beef or we had turkey or something real special like that. And everybody always looked forward to that wonderful fancy meal. Of course, Sunday mornings we had to go to church first, right? We had to do it. Then in the afternoons we got to go to four miles out of town, to Anadarko, to see a movie at the Redskin Theatre. I thought that was so neat to be able to do that. And then on Saturday nights they used to have school dances and it was a jukebox. We never had live music, that was just completely unheard of. But that’s how we learned how to dance. And it was just cold turkey, we’d be practicing in the dormitory, practicing in our room trying to learn how to dance and so forth. That’s how I learned how, just kind of watching and then when somebody would ask you to dance, you just hope to God you knew how to follow through with it. It was fun. My particular project one year with Gloria Kaulity was chickens. So we had these darling little chicks that we raised ourselves, and then we’d feed them every morning and so forth and the whole idea was to take care of these animals, and then we had to butcher them and then sell them. That was the whole idea. When it came to the part to kill them, I could not do it! We would butcher the chickens and then we’d wrap them up and refrigerate them and then we’d take them into Anadarko and it was our job to sell them. We were on our own. We had to figure out how to sell them. I think about that for later on in life. You know, here we were just little kids and yet we had to go knock on doors and say, “We have chickens, we’re in the 4-H club for Riverside. Would you be interested in buying them?” You know, you use those tools during your entire life, so that was great! The training that I had at Riverside School in Home Economics really helped me out later on in life when I had a cafe. I had a cafe on the Wind River Indian Reservation at Fort Washakie, Wyoming and I ran that for several years. And because of my training I was able to prepare the food that I did and it was nothing I had to go and read a menu and study about or anything. I knew how to set tables. I knew how to meet the public. I knew how to make change. I knew how to cook. I also, soon learned how to manage. And all of that, making a living like that was due to the fact that I went to an Indian boarding school. Vincent, Vernon and Audrey LujanVincent Lujan: My formal education started at the Pueblo of Taos and this was during the latter part of the Depression. I’m a product of Bureau schools. This was not as it is now because you were taken away from your family at a very young age and the fact that you were separated. There was alot of discipline from other than your parents. I also served in the military for four years with the U.S. Navy and then I came home, got married and I took my two young sons and my wife then and moved to San Francisco, again a product of the Bureau’s Relocation Program. Vernon Lujan: I grew up initially at Taos Pueblo learning my Tiwa language and living in my community and learning the culture. When we moved out of there to California we lost that sense of community because that was just what the Relocation Program was all about. They wanted to take Indian families out of the pueblo or reservation context and take them to a big city where they could have more opportunities was the whole idea behind relocation. And there were. There were educational and job opportunities but what the government didn’t realize is that as my father said, was that they were taking us out of our communities, and so there was a disintegration of the community on one hand, and on the other it was good for individuals, for most individuals, because they were able to attain an education and a good job. We moved back to Taos and for us we had to become accepted by the community once again. It was like being reintroduced and it was kind of hard because my peers saw me as sort of an outsider, so to speak, they saw me kind of like uppity because I spoke fluent English now, instead of fluent Tiwa and they knew that I knew things and learned things in California that they would never learn. Then my father, being in the service, had a strong work ethic, so we couldn’t stay in bed all day although we wanted to. We had to get up and feed the horses and the animals and clean the yard, clean our rooms and things like that. So that was also reinforced at the St. Catherine’s Indian School, because along with a good education, you were living in a community of other Indian people and one of their ethics was that you had to keep your area clean as well as your living space. What helped us to survive through the years that we were in California and even now is that our culture has always been with us. We took it even though we were taken out of our community at Taos, we took our culture with us, and we took that sense of community and luckily we have a strong sense of family. Indian people are survivors and we’re here, and we’re here to stay. Ellyn BigropeMy name is Ellyn Bigrope. I’m Mescalero Apache. I work at the Mescalero Apache Cultural Center. I’ve been the curator there for six years now. Throughout my life, I was always connected some way with boarding schools. Our Mescalero Apache Chief San Juan made a dramatic speech in a Tertio/Millenial Exposition here in Santa Fe in 1883, he did make the speech for his people, his children to be educated just like the dominant society. So this was in 1883. Even before that, my grandmother was attending boarding schools. She attended Fort Lewis School in Colorado, and then from there she went on to Haskell Institute. Well my high school days were all different. I did attend a parochial school in Arizona for awhile, and I was unhappy there. I just feel that I’m a third generation Catholic, and I just feel that if I want to pray I’d rather do it from my heart, rather than more or less being made to do this and to pray at a certain hour and a certain time. I was unhappy with this, so I left the parochial school, and from there I went on to Haskell Institute. They had a real nice school there where the vocational school was there, of course the high school where I was, and the commercial department. I finally graduated from there in 1959. From there I went to the nursing school. I stayed at the Albuquerque Practical Nursing School for about a year. From there I left and I went on. I went back to Mescalero and I stayed with my parents for a little while. I did work here and there on the reservation. Then without proper education, work was hard to begin with, but I really thought that I needed further training, so the relocation program was there at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. From there, I signed up with them, and that’s how I went on to San Francisco, California, and then of course I met my husband in San Francisco, who is non-Indian. I started thinking about home. So we sat down and we talked about it, and my husband stayed behind and I took my children. We came back to Mescalero. I wanted the children to know the Apache ways, my way. I wanted them around their grandparents. This is how I learned the ways of my people, through the teachings of my grandmother, my grandfather, and my parents, and I wanted this exposure for my three children. Today we all live on the reservation together. There’s two young ladies who, one’s a dental assistant and the other one is the director of the Headstart program, and when they see me they always say, “Here comes Ellyn. We better speak Apache to her.” This is just to encourage. This is just to help preserve the language. |
Phyllis Martinez and Norma JimMy name’s Phyllis Martinez. I’m from San Ildefonso Pueblo and I’m a senior at the Santa Fe Indian School. My name is Norma Jim. I’m a Navajo from the Torreon Community and I’m a senior at the Santa Fe Indian School. At first I was scared cause I didn’t really know anyone here and I didn’t want to leave home cause I’m used to staying at home and I had never been to a boarding school before. So it worked out pretty good now and I liked it, and I got to meet a lot of people from different tribes like Zuni, Hopi, Apache, Sioux and the Pueblos around this area. Phyllis Martinez: This is gonna be my second year at the Santa Fe Indian School. Before I started off at Pojoaque High School. I was there ever since kindergarten and it’s been a real change for me because now that I dorm, I live on campus, it’s a real change because you get more experience of life on your own and you have to take more responsibilities. Norma Jim: Where I went there was nothing but Navajos, so we talk our language there and they teach in our language, and we learn how to write. When I came up here there was hardly anyone to talk to in my language, so I had to find people who I can talk to and afterwards I got used to everyone. Phyllis Martinez: They teach Spanish and French. But I haven’t seen an Indian speak French yet. Ernest HouseI was raised by my grandparents, Chief Jack House and his wife, Sarah Ute House. Chief Jack House was the last traditional chief of our tribe here. Neither of these people could speak English nor write, so everything in our home that I was living with them, we only spoke Ute. So during the time growing up here on the reservation, it was quite simple, the life to live, until education came along, where they brought us here to the boarding school and told us that we need to go to school to get educated to get some sort of a knowledge which is for the outside world. But during the third year, I didn’t go to school at all. I ran away from school. I went around the Ute Mountain because kids and some of the things that I was growing up with wasn’t a very good place to be in at that time, during the time that I was growing up here. The clothes that were given to us by the Bureau or the boarding school were sometimes very short. They had holes in the Levi’s or the overalls or whatever you want to call it, so they would make fun of you. So one night, I decided that I wanted to run away. So I climbed out of the window in the boy’s dormitory which is west of us here. And I ran around the Ute Mountain which is where my grandmother was living, and my grandfather’s sister, and she had livestock and I wanted to go over there to be with her cause I know there nobody would be looking for me. So I told my grandmother if it was all right if I could stay there and she said, “Yeah, it’s all right.” So I stayed there the whole winter and part of summer and the fall. During some evenings I would go toward the east side of the mountain where you would look down into a town called Cortez, Colorado. And there the lights would shine and I would sit on the hillside and I would look down into the town and I would wonder, I wonder what people are doing down there? I wonder if they’re happy? I wonder if they’re having a good time? How do they turn the lights on down there to make it so bright? Cause on the reservation where I was living we didn’t have no electricity during that time and it was just now coming into the area. I often wonder about that and I would go back to the sheep camp where our camp was and play with whatever little toys that I had. And when I was there during the fall, of course the school had just started to get into the fall term, then here comes the truant officer on a pickup and he caught me over there and brought me back. This particular room that we’re in right now was one of the classrooms and I was in here one day and there was a knock on the door. And a knock on the door and the teacher stopped and she went to the door and here came a man who stuck his head through the door and spoke in Ute. And I looked at him and who he was was my grandfather. With him he had a brown sack and in Ute language he said “Here is some clothes that I bought for you. There’s shorts and socks in there,” which made me very embarrassed. I looked around and everybody in this classroom was laughing at me and making fun of me. That was one of the things that I have never forgotten. Another one is that the food that we’re eating during the boarding school days, they would feed you food that you weren’t used to, you didn’t grow up with that, so examples like spinach and olives and stuff like that they would put on your tray. Of course this was new to me and I would look at it very carefully. One day I was over at the dining hall and they were feeding us and I got this spinach and I didn’t want to eat it, but the boy’s advisor was standing right next to the table and he would hit our head if we don’t do things right. So I didn’t want to get that so I went to the place where you empty your tray and I had that in my mouth and I would slowly get it out and he caught me. He took me back down to the boy’s dormitory and gave me a whipping. A lot of things like that. Also we’d try to speak Ute and try to get together with little friends of mine and try to talk with one another in Ute and sometimes they’d catch us. They would get after us and tell us that we could no longer speak Ute, because it wasn’t gonna be very helpful in our life. There was a man by the name of Sam Ray that was the boy’s advisor and he had an artificial hand. And the hand that he wore had a tight glove on it and he would wear it around like so, and walk around. And there was a story along with that, the kids used to say, “Well what happened to his hand?” and one would come up and say, “Well somebody cut his hand off and the hand is still inside the boys’ dormitory. During nighttime you would hear it.” And they would make fun like that and get scared. To survive in this world that we’re living in today, you have to be knowledgeable, not only about yourself. First, know who you are, where you come from, what foundation do you have? As a Native American know a little bit about your tribe, your parents and some of the things, that area that you grew up in, the state you grew up in. What is it that you know about your government? And when you have that, you can take that with you wherever you go to, and sit in a group wherever it might be and be able to work with them. Tony ChavarriaMy name is Tony Chavarria, and I was born in 1968 in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the general hospital there. For the first four years there’s a small elementary school in Denver where me and my brother were the only Indian students in the entire school. And then from that elementary school when my father changed jobs and moved back to New Mexico to his house in Santa Clara. Then we went into the day school for the last couple years of grade school which was another big change. It’s strange how quickly you become adapted to that, you become used to all of a sudden not just being the only Indians but there’s only Indians there. You get used to just being with them and just how rough a place like that can be. The school at Santa Clara, the day school, was a New Deal era school. It was built back in the thirties. The buildings were old. All the fixtures were old. The pipes clanked. The playground equipment was nothing you could ever find in a city because it was so horribly dangerous. But it was really fun, it was really fun. It was always really somewhat strange, because anytime any kind of Indian issue came up, they automatically went to us. We were the de facto experts. Occasionally, we would have to take some kind of strange government tests for some reason. They would make us go sit up in front of the room, turn each desk towards the teacher’s desk and they would give us these tests that really weren’t academic in nature, and to this day I don’t know what they were for. We would have to take those by ourselves and then they would ask us what kind of Indian we were. One other thing is that once they realized we didn’t know how to skip, me and my brother, they actually pulled us out of regular classwork and into the hall with the gym teacher to actually learn how to skip. I still remember that to this day that there’s this whole routine and choreography that went into learning how to skip. Academically we were about a year ahead of what they were doing at the day school. So me and my brother automatically shot up to the top of the class. For awhile there was kind of a jealousy thing or such that `these guys come in, they think they’re so hot,’ what they call back home `cha’,’ `they think they’re so ’cha’.’ Meaning that you think you’re better than everyone else, but eventually they saw that that wasn’t the case and that we just had the misfortune of growing up in a city and going to those schools. So we didn’t learn Tewa as much as we should have when we were younger. It wasn’t until we got to Santa Clara Day School where we began to learn more and more, and also, at Santa Clara, they have a bilingual program in the school. So they also teach it part of the afternoon there as well. The real education in that comes just being in the community and participating in your group. We went to junior high and high school at McCurdy Mission in Espanola. That’s a Methodist school, although probably eighty to eighty-five percent of the students are Catholic. Most of the students are sons and daughters of Espanola politicians, landowners, storeowners, and such. So, I don’t know, it’s kind of like an Espanola Prep, I suppose. But it was always strange because you could see the Methodists, we had to go to religion classes all the time as well, and they were always continually, I don’t know, battling Catholic forces as well as these Indians who had to leave, take absences for these unexplained reasons. Well, my father would let them know, “They’re gonna be gone for a few days and I can’t tell you why.” You know Christianity, their mission is to convert, to convert, and to spread the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, we had continual religion classes. They would kind of say, “Well, it’s good to respect other beliefs and such, but this is the one true way to heaven.” You know God and Jesus, they’re probably big enough that we can work this out when we get there. Well in Pueblo mythology and such, twins can be good or bad. They generally lean towards the negative but then again you also have the Hero Twins who help the Pueblo people. So I think the way we kind of saw it back home was that we could either be twice a curse or twice a blessing, and my dad’s lucky because he got twice the labor. What all the pueblos do, and can do and do well is that they can adapt, adapt really well to these outside influences or forces, be it Spanish Entrada, colonialism, the English, Christianity, the Yankees, and the world system economy. They’ve learned to adapt. |
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My people, the Zuni, settled along the banks of the stream now known as the Zuni River. Our grandfathers spoke of other people with whom they were in contact through their trade network. They also spoke of a prophecy that said: “Beware! In time they will return, those who were pushed beyond our lands. They will come drinking ‘black water,’ speaking nonsense, making pictures with a stick, and they will claim this land as theirs. They will come like thunder in the sky. They will turn brother against brother. When this happens the world will be soon turned upside down.” The prophecy is coming true. In 1539, the Moor, Estebanico came to our village, and we killed him as a “slave spy.” On July 7, 1540, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado came and disrupted the solstice ceremonies and did battle with our grandfathers. The missionaries came next. All who came claimed this land as theirs. In my opinion, the coffee-drinking, foul-talking people who make thunder in the sky with their jet aircraft are the people of the prophecy. Despite these impacts, our culture survives.
The coming of the “non-Indian foreigners” brought both good and bad. The Hopi suffered more during the period of dominance and suppression of the Spanish era than during later eras of contact with Mexicans and other Europeans. The Spanish introduced metal tools to the Native people enabling them to do more in agriculture, building, and hunting. Many Spanish terms are incorporated into Hopi vocabulary. In 1680, the Hopi participated in the Great Pueblo Revolt and helped drive the Spanish from the area. We were never reconquered. Later, we experienced the western Anglo intrusions as the government forced Hopi children into boarding schools to “civilize” them. They also imposed their Christianity, which Hopis successfully resisted. Today, we proudly claim to be a non-Christian community with a culture that is among the strongest of all Native Americans in North America.
We want to be pure in one way or another. I am a full-blooded Navajo. The idea in my mind is a Navajo idea. I use a Navajo blanket, wear Navajo jeans, sing Navajo songs. Taking things for granted, rarely do we look beyond an idea. We accept what our elders tell us without questioning the source or validity of the information. When we look beyond, we find that Navajos have taken freely and responsibly from other tribal groups. Our ceremonies like the Mountain Way and peyotism, our arts, like weaving and sandpainting, our clans, like the San Juan Pueblo and Coyote Pass People clans, have come to us. When we meet, we learn from one another and grow as a people.
After the Long Walk in the 1860s, federal government agents wrenched children from frenzied parents and herded these unfortunate youngsters into stark schools. My mother remembers how they arrived at the school with their shawls and Navajo clothes. One little girl wouldn’t release her shawl when the school people tried to pull it from her. Mabel screamed as she was dragged around grasping her shawl. My mother says she and others cried so Mabel could keep her shawl. Our next federally sponsored migration occurred in the fifties. Navajos were relocated by the hundreds to Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles. When Relocation ended many returned home thankful that Congress’ forced migratory plan ended and that we had become forgotten targets.