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By Malina Seenarine

When visitors enter the “Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories” exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, they are met with images of hundreds of sad and somber faces. Continuing on, more eerie details emerge — little bunk beds, American-style clothes, and a chalkboard that reads: “What is a citizen?”

The exhibit chronicles how Native children were forced from their homes to attend special boarding schools created to assimilate them into Western culture. Some photos are in black and white while the others are in color with the students sporting graduation caps and gowns, highlighting the generations of Native Americans who were exiled from their families and cultures.

Children were forcibly stripped of their indigenous identities, school employees took away their clothes, cut their hair short and gave them new names. They would punish them if they spoke their native language.

The exhibit highlights these acts of cruelty through photos, artifacts and quotes.

One quote by Fred Kabotie, a member of the Hopi tribe who attended the Santa Fe Indian school reads: “When you first started attending school, they looked at you, guessed how old you were, set your birthday and gave you an age. Then assigned you a Christian name. Mine turned out to be Fred.”

The U.S. government-funded Native American Boarding Schools era began in 1860 and ran until 1978. During this time, it is estimated that there were more than 300 boarding schools spanning 30 states and accommodating over 60,000 children. Assimilation through education began long before the boarding schools were built. In 1819, the U.S. Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act, which called for Indigenous students to undergo American-style education.

The issue of government-run boarding schools for Native Americans drew mass media attention in May 2021 when the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at a former Indian boarding school in Canada. In the months that followed, hundreds of remains were found at these Canadian-government funded boarding schools. Recently, an investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland highlighted the abuse that Native American children endured at the hands of federally run schools in the United States, including beatings and solitary confinement. The report also found burial sites at 50 of the former boarding schools.

While recent media coverage of the issue may make it seem that boarding school abuses were newly uncovered, Native-run news sites have long been writing about the issue.

“We’ve been reporting on this for years,” said Mark Trahant, the editor-at-large for Indian Country Today and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe. Indian Country is a multimedia news site that serves Indigenous communities.

The Away from Home exhibit is a recent update from the previous, Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, which opened in 2000. The reason for the update was to “augment both the content and presentation of the original exhibition to reflect the lessons that it inspired,” according to one exhibit poster.

Before and after photographs were commissioned by Richard H. Pratt, founder of one of the first boarding schools to prove that the schools were successful in “civilizing” the students. When the students arrived to the school following their long journeys from home they would be photographed by Choate. Once the process of cutting their hair and changing their clothes was over, the Native students would again be photographed.

Because of the harsh conditions at the boarding schools, it was common for students to run away. One school in Phoenix had over 700 students. Every month 10 to 20 of them ran away.

The U.S. government has never given a formal apology for these policies.

Text and photos by Noel Stevens

One of the most pressing issues in the Phoenix metropolitan area right now is water, specifically the allotment and conservation of it since supply is limited. Different municipalities handle the issue in different ways. Scottsdale, for example, has a tax rebate program that incentivizes homeowners to replace their lawns with artificial turf or native foliage.

What’s becoming clear as the water crisis rages is that desert cities and their inhabitants are going to have to get creative in the face of climate change, and some solutions may well be found in a decades-old tourist attraction. No institution knows the value of native plants better than Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden, a verdant park that takes visitors into what life in Arizona is really about.

The 140-acre attraction was founded in 1939, and the garden features more than 50,000 plants, encompassing 4,482 species, 485 of which are rare or endangered. Through its blog, on-sight signage and community programs, the garden aims to showcase its role as a responsible water user and to educate visitors. Their mission statement reads, “[our] commitment to the community is to advance excellence in education, research, exhibition and conservation of desert plants of the world with emphasis on the Sonoran Desert.”

One notable plant on the garden grounds is the blue palo verde, which is actually the state tree of Arizona. Any spring-time visitor to Phoenix will undoubtedly notice the yellow trees with green trunks towering over them wherever they go.

The palo verde is native to the region and is well-adapted for it. The tree is hardy and fast-growing, and its green bark aids in photosynthesis. This is just one example of how well the garden utilizes native plants for both beauty and practicality, providing shade to park guests and other plant life.

Besides the state tree, Arizona also has a state flower, which is the milky white blossom of the Saguaro cactus. While these don’t bloom until early summer, the yellow blossoms of the violet prickly pear cacti can be found blooming wildly throughout the botanical garden during spring. Most varieties of prickly pear cacti are native to Arizona and this section of the Sonoran desert.

Cacti, especially the Saguaro variety, are integral to Arizona’s natural ecosystem. Signage above playfully explains how different animals rely on, and utilize, the cacti common throughout the desert. Not featured on the poster is how birds, usually owls and woodpeckers, will burrow into tall Saguaros to nest.

In such a harsh climate, the relationship between plants and animals is a delicate one, and everything has its purpose. The palo verde’s falling seeds, for example, will sustain the region’s small animals for some time after the trees stop blooming in the spring.

Pictured on the left is one such bird bungalow typically seen on a mature Saguaro cactus. Pictured on the right is a more spiny varietal of the prickly pear cactus. Some cacti, like the jumping cholla, which is covered in microscopic hooklike needles, inflict great pain when they are touched.

The garden recently launched a project titled the Saguaro Census. Led by the garden’s expert in succulents, the initiative hopes to involve the community and aims to better understand how the cacti adapt to Phoenix’s now-urban environment.

Flowering bushes like the lantana camara seen above can be found in the butterfly and bee gardens peppered throughout the grounds. These sections reflect an important mission for the garden, which is an effort to attract pollinators to the region. The lantana family of plants is not native to Arizona, but they have proven valuable as they are drought-resistant.

The garden features a wide variety of wildflowers. The evening primrose (left) is native to the Americas and enjoys Arizona’s dry climate. As one sign in the garden explains, wildflowers tend to thrive along boulders as accumulating soil and pockets of shade create microclimates within the desert.

The authenticity of the garden’s plant life can be seen through its animal life. Lizards, rodents, doves, quail and any number of insects roam freely, enjoying the garden’s riches.

Pictured above is the terraced entrance to the garden as sunset approaches. Glass sculptures by famed artist Dale Chihuly are on display until mid-June.

The Desert Botanical Garden is open all year. It lies within the city of Phoenix proper and borders Scottsdale to the north.

By Karina Aslanyan 

On a Scottsdale-sponsored website, golf is marketed to potential tourists as one of the locale’s top activities. On its specially designated golf page, the website boasts: “With more than 200 golf courses in the Scottsdale area, a portfolio of luxury resorts and year-round sunny skies, it’s no wonder Scottsdale is known as The World’s Finest Golf Destination.”

The website doesn’t mention that the year-around sunny skies are due, in part, to a 20-year megadrought, nor that each of those golf clubs requires about a million gallons of water per day, a key reason why the partnership with the Scottsdale Water Campus to use recycled water is so important.

Grass, the primary vegetation growing on golf courses, is non-native to Arizona’s climate, and particularly susceptible to desert heat. Not only does the heat result in quicker dehydration and greater need for frequent watering, but there is also a devastating lack of rain or humidity to provide natural hydration.

While some golf courses have begun to use synthetic turf, it is not a viable solution in high-temperature environments, like that of Arizona. According to studies conducted by the Penn State University’s Center for Sports Surface Research, the maximum surface temperatures on synthetic turf fields during hot, sunny conditions average between 140°F and 170°F compared to average temperatures on grass fields that rarely go above 100°F. When synthetic turf reaches a temperature over 120°F, it can cause skin burns in just two seconds.

Though not an option for its golf courses, Scottsdale is already working to replace grass lawns with native vegetation. The city, where 65 percent of water is used outdoors, has been offering grass removal rebates to residents who choose to remove their lawns and replace them with native vegetation, synthetic turf or even gravel. The advantages of native gardening go beyond just water conservation. Native plants help preserve the ecosystem and provide refuge for wildlife.

By Karina Aslanyan and Noel Stevens 

Young people participating in the Youth Community Action Team at the Maryvale YMCA in Phoenix  are immersed in local and national politics. The program helps them navigate and understand the struggles they and their community face. The neighborhood of Maryvale has the youngest median resident age in Phoenix and the second-highest percentage of residents living below the poverty line. In a series of video interviews, members of the CAT program discuss what issues are important to them both as young people and as residents of Maryvale.