“I Should Not Be Wearing a Pilgrim Hat”: Making an Indian Place in Urban Schools, 1945–75

Abstract

“I can still remember walking with my mom to Longview Elementary School for the first day of school,” said Martha Sadongei, thinking back to her childhood in the 1960s. “I remember seeing all these kids, all these parents,” she recalled. “It was crowded, and it was noisy, with the echoing little hallways— they were short hallways but there was still a lot of noise. And I remember my mom taking me to the classroom. I don’t remember being scared. I just remember her taking me and finding the room, and that was it. She just said, ‘This is where you’re going to start school, so just listen to what they say, and I’ll be back. I’m not leaving you. I’ll be back, but you need to go to school.’” Reassured by her mother’s words, Martha Sadongei took her seat in her new classroom and prepared to listen to what her teacher had to tell her.1 In one sense, Martha Sadongei’s story is like the story of almost every American child in the twentieth century. In other ways, however, it is different.2 Martha Sadongei is an American Indian, the child of a Kiowa father and a Tohono O’odham mother. Yet her story is not only different from that of non-Indian children but also from that of many Indian children. Instead of attending a federal boarding school or a reservation school, as did many Native youths in the twentieth century, Sadongei attended a school in the heart of a large city: Phoenix, Arizona. Even though there were tens of thousands of Native Americans like her who attended urban public schools between 1945 and 1975, historians have been rather slow to learn their stories. They have now produced several good studies of federal boarding schools and federal Indian education policy, but they have almost completely overlooked urban Indian school experiences.3 This is no small oversight, for by 1970 the number of urban Indians in the United States was nearly the same