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11. Susan Rayos Marmon: Storytelling and Teaching Susan Rayos arrived at Carlisle in August 1896, a little over fifteen years after Kesetta. She too was thirteen when she made the long, two thousand-mile journey from Paguate in the Southwest. The personal context in which she would receive her education, however, was very different from that of the Lipan Apache girl. Susie’s father, Rayos A-you-teee-ya, had died, but she set out on her venture into the white world with the firm support of her mother, Maria Angela Tsi-wa-ca. The home and community she left behind, although changing, was not shattered and would still be there for her to return to a decade later. Susie had already spent four years at the Albuquerque Mission School when she enrolled at Carlisle for the standard five-year stint. Over half a century later, she recalled that she must have been “about nine years old [when] they came out to Paguate [her native village] and offered the chance to come to the Presbyterian Mission School. My mother had just one daughter, but she wanted me to go because she wanted me to have an education.” Over the next ten years, Susie would “have an education.” When she left home she only spoke Keres. Four years later, when she set out for Carlisle, she had learned English.1 Already she had become familiar with alien patterns of knowledge and belief and the rudiments of a quite different “regime of truth.”2 For Susie Rayos, as for all Indian children who were the first in their communities to undertake white schooling, the demands it imposed brought many challenges. But Susie would claim as her own the new skills it brought and with them the power to define new truths for herself, her family, and her community. Her Carlisle student record card shows that Susie Rayos followed Pratt’s well-established academic and practical regime, and each summer she was sent on “outing.” She worked for seven different fami- Modes of Cultural Survival 284 lies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before graduating from Carlisle in 1903. That final summer, after seven years in the East, she went home but soon returned, to enroll first at Dickinson College and then in the teachers’ course at Bloomsburg State Normal School (now Bloomsburg University). Her teacher’s training qualified her for a job in the Indian Service and she worked at Carlisle for a year.3 Then, after more than a decade away, she returned to live and work in the Southwest as teacher at the Isleta Pueblo school. A short time later, she married Walter B. Marmon and moved to Laguna Pueblo, where she spent the rest of her life. Her marriage tied Susie to a powerful Laguna family with strong links to Carlisle. Walter had spent three years at the school, from 1897 to 1900, and many of his siblings—Agnes, Annie Bell, Maria, Effie, Robert—had also been Carlisle students.4 The Marmon children were half white. Their father, Robert Gunn Marmon, had arrived in the West as a surveyor for the government. Living at Laguna, he learned the language, married a local woman, Sarah Annallo/Anaya (who spoke no English), and made his home in the town.5 He never returned to Ohio and lived the rest of his life at Laguna, even serving as governor of the Pueblo for a year.6 When his first wife died, he was left with a young family. Early in 1893, Walter and his brothers and sisters gained a stepmother when their father married his wife’s sister, Maria Anaya.7 Sarah had not attended Carlisle, but Maria had spent five years at the school, from 1884 to 1889. Although she had arrived unable to speak or read any English , she proved an outstanding student and was reported in the Indian Helper to have “received perfect marks for lessons and conduct in the school-room.”8 So Susie and her mother-in-law shared the experience of this militaristic , white-run boarding school, located nearly two thousand miles from their home. Although they did not attend Carlisle at the same time, the two girls were both students during the Pratt years, so would have undergone similar educational programs and even known some of the same long-serving teachers, such as Marianna Burgess. Maria, however , returned home after the standard five-year period, having reaching the fourth grade level. Susie stayed...

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