In Place of Neglect

When the citizens of sedate Brigham City, Utah (pop. 6,000) first heard the news, there was consternation in town. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had decided to take over an abandoned Army hospital on the southern edge of Brigham City as a school for several hundred Navajo children from Arizona. Some townsmen had visions of a horde of adolescent savages. Others could see their orderly little Mormon community ringed by a fringe of tepees.

Two things happened to make Brigham City change its mind: 1) a citizens' committee visited the Navajo Reservation and returned surprised and pleased with what it had learned about Navajos, and 2) the Indian Service's George Arthur Boyce arrived in town to get things going.

What's Ham? Affable, broad-shouldered George Boyce, 52, had begun his teaching career in Eastern prep schools (St. Paul's, the Lake Placid School, the Chestnut Hill Academy). He had been working with Navajos for more than nine years. At Brigham City he lost no time getting the wheels turning. Within six months, with a $3,700,000 appropriation, he had remodeled every room in the hospital, built a gymnasium and seven other new buildings, organized a staff of 130. By January, George Boyce was ready for his first pupils at Intermountain Indian School.

They came 526 strong, gathered in the biting cold of winter from their widely scattered huts and hogans on the reservation. They were of all ages and most of them were wide-eyed and scared. None had ever been to school before. Almost none had ever seen a bed or a shower, or eaten with knife & fork. Only half could speak any English.

They had to be shown everything: how to turn on a faucet, how to flush a toilet. When they were told to take showers, one boy took his with all his clothes on. When they were served ham on their first day, not one child would touch it until a teacher explained in Navajo that it was cooked meat.

By last week, Intermountain could report real progress. "First off," says Dr. Boyce, "we licked the homesickness problem." Instead of using monochromes of traditional grey or tan, he painted their schoolrooms with "the desert colors the children know--turquoise blue, sandstone red and sage green." He organized sports and hobby groups in knitting, beading, pottery, carving and square dancing.

Why Clean Feet? The school had to plan three different curriculums. There was a five-year course for 14-to 16-year-old beginners, many of whom will be trained for work as truck drivers, straw bosses and cannery workers. There was an eight-year course for the ten-year-olds, who will have time to learn to be tailors, mechanics, etc. For the youngest pupils there was a full-fledged public-school program.

With all Intermountain's beginners, teachers had to use every bit of their ingenuity to make sense of their courses. English teachers cut out carefully labeled pictures of beds, chairs, tables, houses, barns and animals, and pasted them on the walls. Arithmetic teachers played grocery store, tried to relate their blackboard figures to matters their pupils would understand ("We must keep these numbers in a row just like rows of soldiers, or just like horses walking to a water hole"). Counselors pinned up posters that hammered at the homely rules of hygiene:

Dirty feet smell bad.

Clean feet smell good.

Clean feet help you make friends.

Keep your feet clean.

Mops & a Modern World. Gradually a happy routine has settled down over Intermountain. The school breakfasts at 6:45, then tackles its chores of cleaning, mopping and dusting. The teachers join in. "Years ago," says Dr. Boyce, "Indian children were made to work half a day, then go to school a half day. They were shortchanged. We've compressed the chores into one hour and made the teacher part of it."

With plenty of reason to feel pleased with the progress his boys & girls had made, Dr. Boyce hopes to have 1,300 students next fall, 2,000 by 1951. "The oldtime Navajo school," says he, "turned out only misfits, but we are certain we are on the right track. Under the old system, the Indian getting out of school had an almost pathological desire to return to something that no longer existed. We are attempting to provide them with the skills to fit them into a modern world."

Though some 12,000 Navajo children are in reservation schools or at Intermountain, there are another 12,000 for whom there are still no schools at all. The U.S. needed a lot more like Intermountain to begin making up for the years of neglect.

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