Indian School on Magnolia Avenue: Voices and Images from Sherman Institute

Preface

vii Preface The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue: Voices and Images from Sherman Institute is a work born of several research projects created by historians studying public and Native American history at the University of California, Riverside, and Sherman Indian Museum. The Museum is located on the campus of the old Sherman Institute, an off-reservation Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. All of the authors in this book have a relationship with the University of California, Riverside, including the Museum’s director Lorene Sisquoc. Sisquoc has served on numerous graduate committees for students who interned at the Museum. Furthermore, each of the authors in this volume conducted research at Sherman, and all of them are familiar with the Museum’s great steel vault. The vault contains a treasure trove of original documents and photographs that offered every author an opportunity to capture voices and images of students, staff, faculty, and administrators. Every author worked through these sources to research and write their contribution for this book. The following chapters virtually come out of the vault, and the research represents the first anthology assembled about Sherman Institute. Everyone who contributed to this book can attest to the dogged efforts of Lorene Sisquoc to preserve and protect the items found in the vault. For several years and without salary, she cataloged and archived many records of Sherman Institute. In the 1990s, Jean A. Keller joined Sisquoc’s staff as a volunteer to work on the archives and develop a traveling exhibit. Keller and Sisquoc formed a professional relationship that created new research opportunities for graduate students at the University of California, Riverside. Since Sisquoc first opened the vault to graduate students, several research papers, public history field reports, and five Ph. D. dissertations have emerged from the vault’s materials. Too often collections of essays offer works on a broad historical topic, and too often these essays are not closely related. We have constructed our work to focus on Sherman Institute and situate our book on only one of the twenty-five offreservation American Indian boarding schools. We offer the larger experience of Native students at Sherman. We owe a great debt and our sincere appreciation to Museum Director Sisquoc, who made this book possible. Sherman Indian High School, Sherman Indian Museum, National Archives, and the Riverside Metropolitan Museum viii The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue also allowed us to conduct research at their institutions. We especially thank archivistsGwenGranados,RandyThompson,andPaulWormseroftheNational Archives in Perris, California, for their continued and gracious assistance. Curators at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum, including Brenda Focht and Kevin Halarin, also provided access to photographs and information about the school from their museum’s collections. We are grateful to the library staff of the Rivera Library at the University of California, Riverside, with a heartfelt thanks to Melissa Conway and Gwido Zlatkes of Special Collections and University Archives, custodians of the Rupert Costo Library, which specializes in Native American history and culture. In addition, we extend much appreciation to Chancellor Timothy White, Vice Chancellor Dallas Rabenstein, Dean Stephen Cullenberg, Rebecca (Monte) Kugel, Randolph Head, Tom Cogswell, Tom Patterson, Wendy Ashmore, Larry Burgess, Stella Nair, Michael Tsosie, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Jonathan Ritter, Yolanda Moses, Juliet McMullan, and Michelle Raheja of the University of California, Riverside, and Robert Warrior, LeAnne Howe, Jodi Byrd, Vicente M. Diaz, Christine Taitano DeLisle, Robert Dale Parker, Brenda Farnell, Antoinette Burton, Augusto Espiritu, Adrian Burgos, John McKinn, Kate Williams, and Frederick Hoxie of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for their support of our research. We are also indebted to the work of many scholars who have studied Indian boarding schools, including Brenda Child, David Wallace Adams, Clyde Ellis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Margaret Connell Szasz, Jaqueline Fear-Segal, Margaret Jacobs, Devon Mihesuah, Amanda Cobb, Jon Allan Reyhner, and Scott Riney. In addition, Matthew Leivas, Karlene Clifford, Billy Soza Warsoldier, Galen Townsend, Robert Levi, Tonita Largo, Blossom Maciel, and other former students and employees of Sherman provided insights into student life at the school. Finally, we thank our families for giving us time to work on this book, and the students of Sherman, past and present, who made history by engaging the challenges they faced at the Indian school in Riverside. Clifford E. Trafzer, Palm Desert, California Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, Champaign, Illinois Lorene Sisquoc, Riverside, California January 2012 ...