Berkley Center

Elizabeth Duran: The relocation of American Indians to reservations had a huge impact on the self-sufficiency of American Indians and also on the language and cultural practices, especially while they were being watched or under the care of the U.S. Department of Army. The Indian Boarding School Act had a huge impact because children were forcibly removed from reservation, transported hundreds and thousands of miles away from their tribal communities, and put into boarding schools. Young boys had their hair cut, which was very damaging for their cultural identity. Long hair for males was always a gift that gave them a lot of life and strength. They were prohibited from doing their morning offerings, from doing their traditional prayers, singing their traditional songs. Girls were required to wear Western clothing. Boys were trained to do general labor, to work on farms, carpentry. Girls were taught how to cook and do housekeeping with the idea they would become domestic workers.

Children were picked up starting at age five, and many of our children never returned back to the reservations. That had a huge impact in the children who went to these boarding schools had lost that traditional connection. They had lost their language. They had a very difficult time reintegrating back into their communities, many times were shunned by their communities. So, boarding school did horrendous damage. I grew up on the reservation. I attended the public schools at the Pojoaque Valley School District because our parents would not allow me or the rest of our family members to be sent off to the boarding schools in Albuquerque. My older brother and sisters did attend St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe. I'm one of nine children. There's two brothers, and there's seven sisters. The only thing that we had was a community water well. 

We were all self-sufficient. We had our gardens. We learned how to preserve our foods without refrigeration, without electricity. We had the traditional mud houses, Adobe houses with mud floors, wood stoves. All of us raised our own animals for food, our gardens for food. I grew up learning the stories of the importance of the serpents to the pueblos and the one that gave fertility and life to our villages. I grew up learning about the serpents that lived in the Rio Grande and the process of caring for those serpents. I also learned about the need to understand our environment, how you got up in the morning and did your morning prayers. You always said your prayers by standing on earth, not on the sidewalk, not on a wooden step or anything you stepped on. Mother Earth, said your prayer looked to the east, observed the sun, and depending on the appearance of the sun, you could tell that it was going to be cold, if it was going to be a rainy day.

You'd look at the moon at night. It would tell you when you could expect moisture. You would look at the animals. They would tell you whether or not there was going to be change in weather or winter was going to be very cold. We could look at the trees and the plants, the birds. We were taught how to study all these things, and a lot of that's been lost.