The following pages provide a copy of what exists in government records of the Superintendent's Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports for the US Indian Boarding School at Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Indian School, then called the Santa Fe Industrial School, for fiscal years 1910-1930.  These annual reports were combined reports of the Santa Fe Industrial School and the Santa Fe BIA agency office through the fiscal year ending June 30, 1914; the boarding school was segregated from the Pueblo jurisdiction on December 8, 1914. 

These reports date from long before SFIS, like a number of other former government boarding schools, became a community-oriented school operated by Indians for Indians, the All Indian Pueblo Council having first contracted to operate SFIS in the 1970s. 

These documents are from when the SFIS was a US Government Indian Boarding School.  It is from the period of the Indian School known as “the Starving Years” due to overcrowding and the scarcity of food for students.  It is from a period when parents were often not allowed to choose whether their child would be taken miles from home to attend a military-style government boarding school.  It is from the period before students were allowed to speak of, have, or make anything from their own cultural traditions, before the reforms of John Collier's BIA in the 1930s. 

I am Tewa.  My name is Daniel Moya.  I was raised on the pueblo by my grandparents, Feliciana Tapia Viarrial and Fermain Viarrial.  When my grandmother was five years old, in 1909, she entered the US Government Boarding School at Santa Fe.  She stayed all the way through, until 1922, and like other students, was hired out during summers to work in the boarding school “outing” programs. 

Like many, there were things that my grandmother told me about her boarding school experience, and things she did not.  Finding and sharing these documents is part of my trying to learn more about her and what her world was like in these times. 

Perhaps you may find a relative's name in these documents.  If you might like to share stories, I would love to hear from you: daniel at tewa-art.com . 

A person whose name appears on the lists of SFIS students included in these reports may still have a student file preserved at the US National Archives, at the office in Denver.  You can contact denver.archives@nara.gov to arrange to view or to get a copy. 

If you have a family member, likely of an older generation, who went to Carlisle Indian Boarding School, you can also look to see if there's a student file for them and get a copy (from Washington, DC) through the name index and instructions at http://home.epix.net/~landis/FAQ.html . 

These pages were copied from Reel 127 of a 174 reel set comprising the BIA's New Mexico “Superintendent's Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports From Field Jurisdictions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1907-1938.” (NARA microfilm publication M1011)  More information on this microfilm publication and others can be found at http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/native-americans.html under “American Indians NARA Microfilm Publications.”   This reel includes what still exists of the superintendent’s annual reports from 1910-1930.  What still exists of the annual reports for the years 1931-1935 are on the next microfilm reel, Reel 128.  Additional SFIS records are available as NARA microfilm publication M-1473, “Bureau of Indian Affairs Records Created by the Santa Fe Indian School, 1890-1918.”

Sources for more information about the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School include these works by Sally Hyer (in collaboration with the AIPC):

One House, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Remembering Santa Fe Indian School, 1890-1990. PhD thesis, University of New Mexico, 1994.

Oral History Interviews of the Santa Fe Indian School: the First 100 Years Project. 1986. Archival material. http://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=nmu1mss595bc.xml

It's been hard for people to talk about these experiences in a difficult time in history.  Let's share these stories while we still can. 

Daniel Moya

2014 New Mexico History Scholar

daniel at tewa-art.com

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