It isn’t derogatory. Leave it alone

Three years after the idea was first floated, Robert E. Lee Street and Squaw Peak Drive may finally fade into history.

The Phoenix City Council on Wednesday voted to begin the process to rename the streets — with a series of public meetings to gather input for a final decision. But if the removal of Confederate statues across the nation are any indication, one might as well consider it a done deal.

Compared with ripping down statues, changing the names of a couple of minor streets seems downright charitable. Certainly defensible, given the derogatory nature of the term “squaw” and the lack of Confederacy relevance in Arizona to justify a name that

evokes visceral emotions.

That is not the case with Indian School Road, the midtown thoroughfare that stretches some 40 miles from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in the east to Buckeye in the west.

It is so named because of the boarding school for Native Americans at Central Avenue that the U.S. government set up and ran for nearly 100 years.

Seizing on the spotlight trained on Robert E. Lee Street and Squaw Peak Drive, a nascent group wants to rename the road on the notion that the school represented systemic oppression of the Indigenous people and should not be celebrated.

It is a well-intentioned but bad idea. The organizer behind it is a nonNative and the petition she has put forward on the group’s Facebook page has few signatures.

But among those in her camp is a relative of Lori Piestewa, a member of the Hopi tribe and of the Army who became the first U.S. woman soldier to be killed in the Iraq War in 2003, and for whom the former Squaw Peak was renamed.

Kristin Payestewa, who once instrumental in the 2017 push to rename Squaw Peak Drive, told me via email she believes government boarding schools indirectly robbed her of her Navajo and Hopi religious identity and her culture.

Her grandparents, who raised her, were brought up in boarding schools; her “papa escaped” and her grandmother became an adherent of the Protestant church, according to Payestewa.

She wrote, “The influence from the boarding school has halted my upbringing as a proud Diné woman ... I was very sheltered from my culture and was brought up to literally disregard my ‘Indian' background.”

There’s no way to dispute that experience because it was true for a number of Natives. Boarding schools such as Phoenix Indian School had a notorious beginning.

Native American children were snatched from their homes on the reservation and forced to assimilate, stripped of their language, ways of worship and customs, and subjected to harsh discipline. “Kill the Indian, save the man,” in the words of the Army captain who developed the first of the schools in the late 1870s.

Some of the schools housed not only Indian youth but also older adults sent there for punishment and rehabilitation, notes Patty Talahongva, a longtime journalist in metro Phoenix who helped put together exhibits for the Phoenix Indian School Visitors Center.

But the schools, including the one in Phoenix, evolved and many of the cruel practices disappeared by the 1930s.

Students found vocations, purpose and love in their years at Phoenix Indian School. Talahongva found her voice and passion as a journalist there.

Some married classmates who were of another tribe. Others married outside the race.

Many became urbanites, never venturing back to the reservations.

Some did return and became leaders in their tribes – among them Peterson Zah, the first president of the Navajo

Nation, and the late Clinton Pattea, a longtime president of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation.

“The students,” Talahongva said, “changed the school.”

By the time the government closed it down in 1990, students lobbied, unsuccessfully, to keep it open for one more year, the 100th of its existence.

None of the scores of graduates they stay in touch with, according to Talahongva and her sister, Rosalie Talahongva, the curator of Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, have any interest in renaming the street.

It would be the equivalent, in their perspective, of erasing the past — a complicated past, admittedly.

That is, in fact, the very opposite of what they want.

“This isn’t the name of our oppressor,” Patty Talahongva said. “We want to remember. This is part of our history, and a history worth keep telling.”

For which Indian School Road serves as an entry.