'Recognizing and honoring': Albuquerque Indian School Cemetery will get fencing and a memorial

It was 1973. The city of Albuquerque was planning a new park in the near North Valley. When tractors started digging trenches for the sprinkler system, bones and baby slippers were found at the site.

It would one day become 4-H Park, across from the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. But the site was once part of the Albuquerque Indian School. One corner of the property was used as a cemetery, “almost forgotten” according to a 1973 Journal article.

More than 50 years after the discovery and 40 years after the school closed, the city is installing a fence around the site and planning a memorial for the children and others buried there. Terry Sloan, city of Albuquerque intergovernmental tribal liaison, said the memorial would be a “place for education” including a written account of what happened at the site and potentially an outdoor auditorium.

“It’s a way of honoring those who are there, our relatives,” Sloan said.

The fencing is expected to be installed by the end of the month, Sloan said, and has been designed to impact the land as little as possible. Tribal consultation and community meetings were held to guide the plan, which is intended to be an “inclusive’ and “community-created memorial,” he said.

The the plan is still in development, and the estimated cost for the park renovations is to be determined, said Emily Moore, a spokesperson for the Parks and Recreation Department.

“The City has done extensive consultation with affected tribes and pueblos, as well as other stakeholders, which will continue as a design concept plan is completed this year,” Moore said in an email to the Journal.

The cemetery, which was used between 1885 and 1932, according to a former caretaker quoted in a 1973 Journal article, could include the bodies of students and staff at AIS and possibly people who died at the nearby Indian hospital.

The caretaker, identified as Ed Tsyitee, said he believed there were between 25 and 30 people buried in the cemetery, the majority of whom were students. Tsyitee, caretaker from 1932 until his retirement in 1964, said many were buried with old-time military uniforms.

In 2021, a ground-penetrating radar survey — a nonintrusive process that can identify buried objects without turning dirt over — was conducted on the site. Sloan said the tribes have been “apprised” of the survey’s findings.

Sloan said it’s hard to say why the cemetery wasn’t memorialized when it was first discovered. He said it seemed that after Tsyitee died, the area degraded.

“It seemed to us, over time, after he passed, it got neglected … blown in the wind,” Sloan said.

A plaque was installed shortly after the Solar Arc, a public art installation, was relocated to the 4-H Park in 1995. A few years ago, the cemetery’s plaque was reported missing. A second plaque, installed by the community, Sloan said, later went missing as well.

Joe Sabatini, the former branch manager of Special Collections at the Albuquerque Public Library system, has volunteered at the IPCC’s library and archive. Sabatini, a near North Valley resident and active member of the neighborhood association, said he became interested in the cemetery and began researching the site.

The Albuquerque Indian School was in operation from the 1880s to the 1980s. After the school’s closure, students were transferred to Santa Fe Indian School.

The school was regimented to an almost militaristic level, Sabatini said, with students wearing uniforms and being organized into “platoons” and “companies.” Education included vocational skills; in fact, Sabatini said, what is now 4-H Park was once used for agricultural training.

Assimilation was the goal, not only at Albuquerque’s Indian School but also at other boarding schools around the country, Sabatini said.

“You mix different tribes, you take the children hundreds of miles away from their homes and families and you cut their hair, which is culturally significant,” Sabatini said.

During the years the cemetery was in use, Sabatini said, infectious diseases were prevalent among students. Records show that in 1925, six children at the school died from a measles outbreak, he said, not to mention the flu outbreak of 1918, scarlet fever and mumps.

In July 2021 — the same year Canada came under scrutiny with the discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the sites of that country’s “residential schools” — the city of Albuquerque formed the 4-H Park Work Group.

A few months later, the city held a reflection and memorial for the Albuquerque Indian School Cemetery at the Native American Community Academy.

That same year, a resolution was passed unanimously by the City Council and signed by Mayor Tim Keller to recognize the cemetery as a “historical and sacred burial site,” and acknowledge the harm to Indigenous communities caused by Indian boarding school policies.

Sloan called the cemetery a sacred site and said he “made the decision to move forward and address it.”

“It’s recognizing and honoring what happened to the children that were there … and reconciling the atrocities that occurred,” Sloan said.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the month the 4-H working group was created. It was created in July 2021.