"Let's Get in and Fight!": American Indian Political Activism in an Urban Public School System, 1973

Abstract

In the fall of 1972, as Michael Hughes began his junior year at East High School in Phoenix, Arizona, he was one of only a few American Indians in the school. Of the approximately 2,500 students, only 35—or about 1.4 percent—were Indian. To most teachers, administrators, and even fellow students, he and the other Native students in this large, urban high school were virtually "invisible." One way in which this invisibility manifested itself was in the school's curriculum. "I specifically remember our high school textbook," Hughes said. It was a pretty big textbook on American history, but I think there were only about two sentences on Indians in the whole book. And one was at the very beginning, when the Pilgrims came over and they met the Indians, and then the other one was in the 1800s when the settlers were trying to settle and the Indians were being hostile to them, always fighting with the settlers.1 A deficient curriculum was, unfortunately, only one of the problems that Hughes faced. The dropout rate for Native Americans in the Phoenix Union High School System as a whole was almost 25 percent, the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group in the district.2 What would Hughes and Phoenix's urban Indian community do about these problems? Would they just accept their situation and do nothing? Would they merely let themselves "disappear," by either dropping out of school or assimilating into the mainstream? For Phoenix Indians, 1973 would turn out to be a pivotal year for answering these kinds of questions. Looking at how Phoenix Indians responded to these challenges can help add to our understanding of American Indian political activism the [End Page 607] 1960s and 1970s, a topic that has rightly received increasing attention in recent years.3 The particular Phoenix case offers us a chance to, first of all, examine a story beyond the most well-known and well-studied aspects of 1960s and 1970s Indian activism: the occupation of Alcatraz Island, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the standoff at Wounded Knee. Secondly, the evidence available for this Phoenix story may also offer some new insights into how Native communities pursued their political goals in these decades. Through the interviews and the written materials that Indians and non-Indians of Phoenix have shared with us, we can obtain a fairly detailed appreciation for the methods Indian activists used in this specific community, in this specific year, regarding the specific issue of education. This in-depth, up-close examination is one that we can compare to the existing literature on Indian activists' methods in general, looking for reinforcements of those generalizations as well as possible modifications of them. Though this essay will analyze a single year and a single issue in the history of the Phoenix urban Indian community, its focus certainly does not mean that 1973 was the only year in which Phoenix Indians were active, nor does it mean that education was the only issue with which Phoenix Indians were grappling. The history of urban Indians in the Phoenix area begins well before 1973; in fact, Indians have interacted with and lived in the city of Phoenix ever since Euroamericans founded it in 1867. To be even more accurate, Indians—contemporary O'odham call them the "Hohokom"—created urban communities in the area many generations before Europeans arrived. In terms of the twentieth century, though, the development of an identifiable urban Indian population in Phoenix mirrored the pattern of Indian urbanization in other U.S. cities. The migration was relatively slow in the first decades of the century, but it began to accelerate during and after World War II. By 1970, approximately 8,000 Indians made their homes in the city. Most of them moved (and still move) to Phoenix for the...