Beth Leahy
ENGL 540
Library Assignment
Part One: CSWR
I used the Rocky Mountain Database for a box that might pique my interest. Because I’m at the very beginning of my graduate career (which doesn’t even officially start until next fall), I don’t have any firm research interests that I’m actively pursuing at the moment. I browsed our holdings in the CSWR that fell under “Education”. I wanted to stick fairly close to the 19th century, so when I found a listing for a box about the Santa Fe Indian School, which was founded in the late 19th century, I decided to take a look at it.
The box is actually part of something called the 100 years project. As the school approached its 100 year anniversary, it embarked on a project to interview former students, employees, and teachers—anyone that had been involved with the school over the last 100 years. These interviews took place between 1986 and 1987. The results are housed in the box I looked at. It contained 28 folders. The first folder was a pamphlet about the history of the school. The rest of the folders contained transcripts of the interviews- 27 in all. Each folder was for a different individual interviewed. I skimmed many of the interviews but took a closer look at the following. Here are some interesting things I found:
Folder 9- Mortimer and Esther Clifford
Mortimer Clifford (Sioux) was a baker at the Santa Fe Indian School, and started there pre-WWII. His wife, Esther (Jemez), was a nurse at the Indian Hospital. I was actually quite intrigued with the stories Esther told that had nothing to do with the school. She had initially secured a post at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN, where she was to do a year of rotations. When the war came, she was told that they no longer needed her, so she stayed in New Mexico. Throughout the interview she kept bringing up this missed opportunity to work at the Mayo Clinic, and I found myself cheering for her when she finally related an incident where, at another hospital, she found herself scrubbing in for brain surgery alongside the Mayo brothers. She was delighted to be able to work with them after all. She was so excited, that she shook their hands, causing everyone to have to scrub up again. Esther also told of two separate incidents when Albert Einstein visited her hospital and had lunch with the staff. She noted that his English wasn’t very good. He talked with them about some problems he was working on, and gave them little equations to solve. Both Esther and her husband had also met John Collier and Oppenheimer as well. I found these casual references to huge figures to be quite fascinating.
Folder 12- Estefanita “Esther” Chavez Toledo (Jemez Pueblo)
Esther was born in 1901 and attended the school from 1911-1918. She described having to ride up to the school on a burro—a journey that took 2 days and required a change of clothes before setting foot in the school because pueblo garb wasn’t allowed. When asked about going home for holidays, she told that students only went home in the summer. She didn’t divulge a lot about her experience—the interviewer had to really work to get her to give more than a few words for an answer, but she did tell an interesting story. When asked whether the children at the school ever ran away, she first said only the boys did. When pressed about it, she admitted that one time she and several girlfriends ran away once because they wanted to go home for a feast day (not being able to go home for feast days was a recurring theme I saw when I browsed other interviews). They actually made it fairly far on foot with no shoes, but they grew tired because they had nothing to eat or drink. The next day they were found and brought back to the school. Their punishment consisted of being dressed in a gunny sack and walking around the water reservoir on the campus for two days. Esther seemed embarrassed about this, but the interviewer told her that these days if anyone tried to punish somebody in this manner, the punisher would get in trouble. The interview concluded with Esther stating that the school was a good experience because she just wanted to learn all she could and it helped her be a good wife to her husband.
While the box that I looked at was very interesting, and something I may want to go back to at some point in my studies, it obviously isn’t going to be anything I’ll put to use for our class. I thought it was fun to find a box of stories and lose myself in them, though, and this visit (my first ever) to the archives at CSWR certainly helped familiarize me with what my resources are at UNM.
Part two: Electronic Resources
I used this assignment to find some newspaper articles about Sojourner Truth.
I used the database titled “America’s Historical Newspapers”, which I found by browsing through the database advisor on the library home page. I did a simple search for Sojourner Truth, and limited the dates to the 19th century (the database holds articles through 1920). There were several hits—some were just a mention of an appearance. I browsed until I found a letter in the October 15, 1958 issue of The Liberator that proved to be interesting. The letter is addressed to Garrison, and is titled “Pro-Slavery in Indiana”. The letter writer, William Hayward, talks about anti-slavery meetings that Truth is holding in Indiana. He points out that Truth is well known, but has to further note that she “comes well recommended by H.B. Stowe, yourself, and others”. He mentions that the people of Indiana are suspicious of Truth, and that there were rumors that she was a man and even a mercenary for the Republican party. He goes on to describe a particular incident at one of these meetings, which turns out to be the breast incident we’ve been reading and blogging about. Looking back at Bacon, page 180, I see that she quotes directly from this particular letter when writing about the breast incident. I wasn’t even searching for this particular article, so this was an interesting find, indeed!
I find it interesting that Hayward has to preface his comments about the outrage of Truth’s treatment at this event by stating that she is endorsed by himself, Stowe, and Garrison. Truth, as Hayward points out, is already well known at this point. The letter appears in The Liberator, a pro-abolition publication. Despite these facts, the male letter writer still finds it necessary to give her agency by lending his credentials to her for the readers’ benefit. I would be interested to look further at issues of this publication to see other examples of how female (white and African-American) abolitionists are introduced or mentioned.