Assimilation is still alive. During my time attending a parochial school in our Zuni community,we were only ever taught English and how to write in cursive. I never really knew why the school I went to was frowned upon by most of my community. It was never like people hated me for going to the school, but rather didn’t like the school becaue it reminded my people of the troubles that our people faced. There was a Zuni language class that every class went through one day out of the week for forty-five minutes. We never spoke any of the dialects in class. It was always just a couple little coloring projects, sometimes we even sat there and did nothing. None of the teachers I had were Zuni. When I first started schooling I remember my teacher discouraging the class from speaking Shiwi'ma with the demand, “Stop speaking that, you won’t use that anywhere in the real world.”

“Kill the Indian and save the man.” Stories passed down of a dark history ignored and swept under the rug. I grew up hearing of all the wrong things this great country has done to Natives. Zuni has been one of the few Indigenous peoples that have survived forced assimilation and mass genocide. Indigenous people have faced lots of hardship in different ways. To this day educational standards still encounter problems in teaching our youth. Now that I’m older I understand the injustices of my people. My younger self did not once understand the harsh treatment that my ancestors faced.

Colonel Richard Pratt is known for his speech, "The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites," he gave at the nineteenth annual conference of Charities and corrections. “Kill the Indian in him, save the man” is what he said, as he asserted that it was a mistake to think the Indian is born an inevitable savage. His point was that the Indian man was the same as the black or white man, and that he deserves the absolute right to liberty and opportunities that everyone has. From this the first boarding school was established: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Boarding schools were a terrible place to have been sent to, and some children never made it back home. Boarding schools were built all over the country. Children were taken from their homes and forced to forget where they came from. Cruel punishment was dealt to the children who disobeyed the rules of their schools. Use of Indigenous languages was forbidden. Forced to forget everything that had been taught to them, traditions and languages were lost forever.

Unmarked graves of children that once attended these boarding schools are being found. These are the children that never made it back home due to cruel punishment and inadequate medical care. One of the many boarding schools can be found here in Albuquerque NM. The Merriam report of 1928, found that the boarding schools were cruel and “grossly inadequate” in their care of Native American students. All across the country, more and more graves of these children are being uncovered.

The Trail of tears, a forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans force marched tribes to leave their sacred homelands to settle in unfamiliar surroundings. A thirst for new world expansion was craved by settlers and Native Americans were seen as a a barrier in this westward expansion. President Andrew Jackson was allowed to negotiate with Native American tribes to relocate them to what was called “Indian territory”. He was able to negotiate nine out eleven treaties, with the promise of financial compensation and protection by the federal government. In this hardship thousands of Native Americans died from disease, starvation, and exposure to extreme weather as they were escorted by the US army hundreds of miles from what they knew as home.

We’re fighting modern battles to this day. I speak of a battle that is being fought over the classroom. The most recent case is Yazzie/Martinez v. The State of New Mexico. A fight over the insufficient school resources and lack of student opportunities that the New Mexico constitution had guaranteed. Schools located near tribal lands are the ones that are deprived the most. Yazzie Martinez is the result of violation of the state constitution as the Public Education Department(PED) failed to comply with the New Mexico Indian Education Act. Programs and services were ruled not culturally relevant, and schools are still not providing culturally relevant education for its American Indian students. The case was won in 2018, the year is 2022. Why has not much changed?

I understand that there are many points of feelings towards this topic. I am simply trying to state how assimilation is not just a thing of the past, we still have a curriculum that fails to adequately educate and prepare students near tribal lands for post secondary education. The hardships are just more of the dark history that this country was founded on.

The matter at hand is nothing simple, there is no certain way to justify all that has been done to Natives in this county. The past is the past and what has been done is done. We live in a modern time and things change to benefit the needs of people, right? Why have K-12 schools stayed relatively the same for the past fifty years? There is a need for change, the voices of many are greater than the few. Our Native youth are the future of our peoples. We can’t lose who we are and where we came from.