Santa Fe Indian School

After the morning at the hospital, we were all breathing a little easier, so we headed directly to the Santa Fe Indian School to see if we could look around or get a tour or find records.
I had done a little research before the trip, so I knew the school and the grounds were now being administered by the New Mexico Pueblo Indian Council -- a leadership group of the 19 tribes. thought they might have records.
I also discovered that the council had decided to knock down nearly all the old building in August -- and decided not to tell anyone until the dust was rising. There was a fair amount of controversy I read about in the local papers covering the building razing. Teachers and students with whom we spoke at the school expressed surprise and shock at coming back to find the old buildings in rubble.

Well, after a fair amount of bureaucratic backing and forthing, we found our way to the library and I installed my parents with a book on the history of the school; I made my way to the principal's office to see if we could at least tour the new facilities -- and ferret out any information we could about the school.

We had already unsuccessfully attempted to find out if there were any records we could search -- the admissions officer is one of the staff who was still reeling from the buildings being torn down -- he claimed that most of his records were in boxes in a shed and those records did not extend past the 1970s -- when the Albuquerque Indian School became the Santa Fe Indian School. At least three different people gave us clues as to where BIA records on the original school might be -- and none of those places was in the state of New Mexico.

Whenever I explained my grandmother's story to people at SFIS, I got a look of crazy disbelief. Why would a bunch of Mexican orphan kids get sent to an Indian school over 200 miles from their relatives? Why not an orphanage? Exactly.

Our tour guide was fantastic. Though we got the short version of the tour, he filled in with some history about the Pueblo Indians and some personal anecdotes about attending the school from his perspective and from his family members' perspective.

We got to see the new dorms, the classrooms and the recreation hall as well as some of the grounds.

In the course of this talk and meeting the school secretary -- we learned about the other Indian school -- St. Cate's they kept calling it. This was their rival and it was for Indians too and it had closed. The secretary gave me the contact information for the last principal.

We ended our visit with picture taking of the rubble.

I wondered about the spirits that might have been released with the tearing down of the walls. One of the girls who showed us around before we had our tour guide told us until this year, she had lived in the old buildings. When I asked her what it was like to live there, she said spooky. Apparently there was a fair amount of haunting going on in the old buildings.

I comforted myself with the knowledge that nothing could really look like it had when my grandmother would have been here -- the school would have only been about 20 years old. It had been built on the outskirts of town and now it was surrounded by city and only about a mile from the historic plaza.

There is one building from the original structures that is still in use -- they call it the U Shaped Building. It now houses the indigenous language institute -- somewhat ironically the institute that strives to save indigenous languages in housed in one of the buildings that was built to strip students of their culture and language. It's a tangled web.
We left emotionally and physically exhausted -- and hungry -- in our crazy day we had forgotten to eat lunch between the hospital and visiting the school. So we headed out in search of food -- and I full of doubts about whether my grandmother had really been at this school... and whether or not we would ever be sure.