Places of Memory: Whiteman's Schools and Native Communities

While visiting New Mexico, the author was struck with the opportunity the state presents to explore the school-community relationship in rural, religious, and multiethnic sociocultural settings. In New Mexico, the school-community relationship can be learned within four major culture groups -- Indian, Spanish-American, Mexican, and Anglo. Together, studies of these culture groups form a portrait of schooling in New Mexico, further documenting the range of ways that host communities in our educationally decentralized society use the prerogatives of local control to "create" schools that fit local cultural inclinations.

The first of four planned volumes, this book studies the Pueblo Indians and Indian High School. The school is a nonpublic, state-accredited, off-reservation boarding school for more than 400 Indian students. A large majority of the students are from Pueblo tribes, while others are from Navajo and Apache tribes. As a state-accredited school, it subscribes to curricular, safety, and other requirements of New Mexico. As a nonpublic school devoted to Indian students, it has the prerogative to be as distinctive as the ethnic group it serves.

USE SHORT BLURB COPY FOR CATALOGS: This ethnography of the Pueblo Indians and Indian High School epxlores some of the ways that host communities in our decentralized society use the perogatives of local consul to create schools that fit local cultural inclinations.