---

---

 

Somehow, here—before the picnic ramadas and megaplayground and volley and basketball courts near a man-made lake with knolls bristled with grass—stood, for ninety-nine years, a residential boarding school named Phoenix Indian School. 

But no more. 

This acreage is now called Steele Indian School Park and my stroll follows memory. First, my own. Prior to moving to Seattle almost seven years ago, this park was picnicked in with dates and its fields smashed into at rugby practice; and across a pathway was chain-link fence guarding what was my first Pride festival eight years earlier—as a mostly closeted twentysomething temporarily liberated—but now nearing mid-thirties and out-out, sweat off my brow isn’t from spying at unattainable lovers, but from sun beaming off signage of older memory, of what this place used to be before me. Affixed to lampposts are historical markers. One placard reads, and it’s a mouthful: In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] wanted to give Native American children the opportunity to interact and become a part of the larger American culture.

What the actual f—Give? Become a part of?

With that goal in mind, Phoenix Indian School was founded in 1891 as the United States Industrial School of Phoenix.

The marker continues, as do the fuck-offs from my lips: Students came to Phoenix from throughout the country, but Arizona was home to the majority. Located three miles north of the Phoenix city limits, it was the BIA’s second largest off-reservation school for Native American youngsters. This park then, and for nearly a century, was one of hundreds of residential boarding schools across the United States, Canada, and Mexico during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to educate the easiest to thieve: Indigenous children, in which the U.S. government systemized and legally required their attendance. Though, what’s my visit’s purpose? No one mandates my presence. No one roll calls me on this walkabout. What brings me here, really, is my own curiosity to experience pilgrimage in unholy land (though, welcome to the twenty-first century for We the Indigenous).

Around the park two dozen markers spattered in bird shit form what’s called Circle of Life, a looping pathway narrating the school’s lifespan from beginning to end. In year one, 1901, christened with a new name Phoenix Indian School, a placard says, Four students were honored for completing the eighth grade and eleven girls were awarded certificates in domestic science. Old-timers from the homeland—the Gila River Indian Community—likely attended this campus at some point in their lives, including Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and many others from the Hopi reservation, Navajo Nation, Tohono O’otham Nation, all the Apache homelands, and more, including my own Yavapai-Apache grandmother born into the Silent Generation.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School. 

Another marker says by 1935 the school had a standard high school curriculum with courses in English, general science and biology, history, economics, mathematics, and geography—as well as God’s work, my research later revealed from scholarly textbooks, chiefly David Wallace Adam’s Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Students from the same tribe, for instance, were forbidden to dorm together to guarantee interaction through a common language called English. Christianity was compulsory and enforced by white teachers and their yardsticks hurt, Grandma remembered. Native boys were trained for labor-intensive jobs, while girls were thrown into dresses as domestic laborers for outings as Grandma described, in which they cleaned white estates every Saturday for pocket money. Ask any Native old-timer and they’ll pinpoint the school’s true purpose, along with the hundreds of other residential schools across North America.

Isolate children from their cultural centers. 

Eradicate Native tongues. 

Christianize. Americanize. 

Hear it—history? In the language my thoughts reason in? It’s the same language my household argued and expressed love in. It’s the same language white teachers in my white middle-class neighborhood in west Phoenix had inaccurately assumed was my second language because of my brown skin. Then after Californians flooded Phoenix in the 1990s, everyone at school was suddenly brown like me and thought the other-other colonial language was my mother tongue, too: Español. Never. English is the sole voice in my head and off my tongue as the pathway—again, called Circle of Life—spins my head into oblivion.

But chatter. From them. Ears eavesdrop—hear them?

Resting on benches are houseless Natives. They look like cousins and aunties and grandparents all ragged and it’s hard not to pity their plight. They are distant kin so far removed they’re strangers—apparitions, perhaps, limboed at this school razed to nearly nothing, and erected like headstones are those fucking historical markers—and their hellos and nods spook me, shy my gaze elsewhere. Like over there, where two news helicopters collided while pursuing a car chase—when? a decade ago?—and the wreckage splattered across the park. A memorial plaque for two pilots and two photographers says, We hope you will find this a peaceful and special place, and it is while recalling where my life was during that 2007 midair collision: as a semicloseted grad student days from my twenty-fourth birthday, and secretly dating and living with a divorced, closeted white man eighteen years my senior. He had two children visiting every other weekend and the four of us had nothing in common, a hallmark of a doomed and secret six-year union only halfway through. Memorials. That’s all this park is. Remembrance. An entire was. And the ghost is me, isn’t it? Drifting through memory with eyes just as haunted as the other Natives compelled to be here too. 

My walk in the park continues and reading each historical marker whitewashes history in real time, therefore me, which began with them then. Or at least until the 1960s and ’70s when Native communities retook their children by opening their own reservation schools, thus sparing my parents from residential school hell. A marker concludes: On May 24, 1990, the final graduating class of nineteen students crossed the stage of Memorial Hall to receive their high school diplomas, ending Phoenix Indian School’s remarkable ninety-nine-year history.

Remarkable. 

Remarkable?

It’s remarkable that that word was chosen to applaud a legacy that, according to my father’s outrage from long ago, was to kill the Indian and save the man, a quote paraphrased from Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School. My old man’s outrage burns within me, too, because after Phoenix Indian School closed due to low enrollment, the campus was abandoned and fenced off for a decade and then rebuilt as a city park named after a white man and special agent for the federal government, the late Horace C. Steele. Of course it was.

Whatever this place is meant to be:…is it a park? museum? memorial? 

What is someone like me supposed to do here:…play? remember? mourn? 

Other than to mute any ill feelings or intrusive thoughts…?

Circle of Life guides me to three surviving school structures: Dining Hall, Memorial Hall, Grammar School. But apparitions line their doorways. See them? My imagination does. Tiny ghosts eat, gather, learn. Next, they drift into dorms demolished long ago and sob asleep and dream whatever those Native children actually mused about, until a nightmare tosses them from their cots because their terror was real after all. But no one sleeps at Steele Indian School Park anymore, unless houseless.

Anyway, my father had misquoted Captain Pratt whose true words were: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” 

In him. 

In her. 

Inside them, the children.

Grandma herself survived six years of hell, but what forever changed her plight was a solitary, sweet remembrance. As she elaborated: late one night, ghosts in a dorm bathroom had terrified a heap of teenage girls who stampeded downstairs into a pile of tangled bodies, and trapped beneath was Grandma’s friend Hazel with a busted arm. They arrived at the emergency room when a nurse—the nicest, most comforting and professional human being, Grandma gushed—welcomed them, and she was transformed. Grandma had found her calling. A nurse, she agreed, in a long career that ignited back at Phoenix Indian School where she excelled in every class and earned top honors as valedictorian. She was accepted into nursing school and then graduate school to become one of the earliest Native women to earn a master’s in nursing at Arizona State University. Then for decades she supported patients and families at rez clinics. It would be hypocritical to say she was ruined by residential schooling as well as ironic to agree residential schooling saved her. Near the end of my interview, Grandma put it in her own words.

How did the boarding school change you? It made me more determined, she said.

White teachers believed the future for students was vocational labor rather than a professional career. Grandma disagreed. And despite the residential school’s piss-poor academics and poorer instructors—that’s how it was in those days, Grandma lamented—she reshaped her plight so future days would be better. 

For her. 

For her kin. 

For her grandson who retraces her steps at Steele Indian School Park.

For a quarter mile her imaginary footprints are trailed until my own size-fifteens are conjured from an old running route that circled the same placards over seven years ago. My workout looped—oh that’s right!—the crunchy hillsides used for picnics and reading and the highest knoll had impressed dates. Well, a date. With a rugby teammate. Position two. The Hooker. Our lovemaking overlapped with that divorced white man’s sexual disinterest in me, and in nearby fields we scrimmaged together and warred on-field and lost to teams stronger than ours. Then we sang rugby songs in the traditional third half (aka drinking with the opposing team to wash away any on-field beefs). Then a half-year later we met for our knoll-top date…right…over…there. Even back then the park’s history thickened the air in seriousness that continues to choke me today. For the last of us has diminished to me. Meaning my tongue doesn’t know a lick of the Akimel O’otham language. And not a ritual nor a prayer from the Akimel O’otham faith, our true faith lost along the way, is embedded in my brain. Parkgoers don’t know the honest history of what this land was—a culture-erasing hell—nor the honest history of me: culturally erased. 

Someone watches me. 

My periphery senses it. 

Across a pond is a man on a bench. He nods, meaning his horniness—yes, a springtime desire—yearns to sidetrack my pilgrimage. We look the same age, therefore he’s too young for me. My back turns on him and ahead is a long stretch of sidewalk curling into a fifteen-acre enclosure called Entry Garden. The outer ring curves inward, where desert trees and shrubs rise around me, and my head spins. Entry Garden is but spiraling and descending walkways and stalking me is the man who left his bench. Though he’s paces behind, our encircling sidewalk aligns side by side and we are like planets caught in the other’s orbit. Perhaps in a different lifetime our hands would grasp one another while the journey swings us into the garden’s center: at a pottery-shaped fountain; muddy, trashy. A waft of piss drifts from a Native woman who digs in a garbage can. She minds her business. Return the favor, a thought pleads, so at a bench my hand scrawls nothing in my journal as the man watches me. Leave me alone, another thought argues. But don’t go, vanity counterpoints. The man kicks pebbles, has no endurance. Minutes pass. He pouts out. 

We’re alone, the Native woman and me. She sips from a cup found in a garbage can and guilt swells my insides. She needs help, yet what provisions can my empty wallet offer? Nothing, other than more thoughts centering on her: everything in the universe has history including this park, yet hers is curious. Guessing is dangerous because that’s how myths are made and what’s a myth but an elaborate guess. Still my brain considers: what got her here? to this day? at this minute? in front of me? searching for cigarette butts on the sidewalk? There must be a detail in her past that swayed her here. My own life could have curved like hers. What got me here? to this day? at this minute? on this bench? overthinking the nature of me? The American Dream and wherever it leads is measured through job titles—right, Grandma?—so backtrack from the end.

To me, today: as a nonprofit manager mentoring young people.

Before that: tribal GED instructor. 

Previously: support staff for Native teen boys in recovery from drugs and alcohol. 

And: social worker supporting houseless youth.

Then: adjunct professor.

Prior: first-grade teacher. 

Finally: special education paraprofessional for high schoolers. 

Left out, of course, are the shitty jobs, like theatre ticket agent and bricklaying alongside my father, and gay bathhouse employee, and sex phone operator for one forty-second call, gym staff, home caregiver, et cetera. Why censor those jobs? It’s no different than the historical markers bleaching its stains out. In fact, it’s worse because who whitewashes my life is me—huh. A message tilts my head. Stenciled onto the stone walkway are megasize lines of poetry around thirty steps long. Beneath my sneaker, stanzas burn my irises. They proclaim: a great circle in changing, and always come back, then the line is cut off and more text continues up the pathway.

A great circle in changing…

And always come back…

We do, don’t we? Us in the park? But someone must break the pattern. The pattern of returning; or nostalgia’s grip; or whatever this park walk has become. Time to find my way out of this garden maze. On my stroll to the rental car, the man who followed me is back on his bench and across from him is a second man, handsomer, who cuts to the chase. 

Good morning, the handsome man says to the first.

Then a third man loops them on a bicycle. Whatever’s absent in our lives—companionship, answers, direction, fornication—is this park where all four of us will find it? On a spring day warming up the possibilities? This moment, here, in Phoenix, very well may climax, as one does postepiphany, for the purpose of life is to spread, so why argue with myself? So say hello or whatever the universal proposal is to foursome an afternoon, which is to say nothing at all; but is that desecrating this park’s memory? an offense? but springtime widens opportunities versus oppresses them. And so this park, where a younger, fitter me played rugby, fell in love, read, ran, danced at Pride for the first time, and where a younger, fitter Grandma survived, who’s to say how seasons in their prime should bud, pollinate, burst, flourish?

Eh. 

Next time. 

Daytime is tiresome.

So is overthinking.

For the moment has already passed.

 

---

D. A. NAVOTI is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. He won the 2025 Nonfiction Literary Award from the Tucson Festival of Books and was the 2023–25 Indigenous Community Liaison for 4Culture’s Poetry in Public program.

Featured image by Jeremy Alford, courtesy of Unsplash.