American Indian Culture and Research Journal

They put me in the boarding school and cut off all my hair, gave me an education, but the Apache’s still in there. -Mitch Walking Elk This article details the account by Clarence Hawkins, a White Mountain Apache, of his escape from the Albuquerque Indian School around 1920. I knew Clarence for over twenty years, and he told me this story several times. I tape-recorded it in 1990, shortly before he died. The following quote from my journal may give some idea of his personal significance to me: Clarence died on Thursday, Sept. 23, 1993. He was 82. Alvino [his second eldest son] called me on Fri. morning at 7:00. The wake was to be held starting Thursday at Judy’s [his youngest daughter] house. I was so shocked that I didn’t even ask that till later. He died of cancer arid liver problems in the IHS hospital. He went into a coma before he died. Although there are a number of personal accounts about American Indian boarding school experiences, I believe the significance of Clarence’s story of his escape from Albuquerque is in the detail of the difficulties and the persistence he showed in his desire and effort to return to his reservation several hundred miles from the Albuquerque Indian School. It also exemplifies the type of reaction many Indian youth had to the American government’s plans for cultural assimilation. Clarence’s journey compares to. James McCarthy’s one-hundred-and-fifteen-mile walk from the Phoenix Indian School to Tucson in 1907, and the anonymous students who covered over 200 miles in their flights from the Mt. Pleasant Indian School in Michigan.