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Dr. Eugene Leitka, of the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma, will turn 95 next month. He remembers visiting the BIA dorms in Magdalena periodically on Fridays as a New Mexico State University doctoral student in 1968.
He recalled the man in charge of the dorms as being a “friendly guy” and getting the impression that the students seemed happy. Still, Leitka was concerned the teachers at the school and dorm staff were not adequately engaging or supporting the Navajo students.
“Our interest was the academic achievement of Navajo kids compared to the other groups of ethnic groups, and that was my purpose for being here, but they wouldn’t share the records with me. However, there’s more than one way to get information,” Leikta said. “One of my closest friends graduated from New Mexico State and became the principal. So he said, Gene, come up here. I want to show you something, and he shows me all these statistics that Native Americans are still at the bottom.”
Leitka was concerned the teachers lacked the skills or interest to help the children learn a new language.
“Everybody else is achieving, but the Native American kids were down at the bottom, and that was my purpose for being here,” Leitka said. “They were not given the attention that they needed. In class, the teacher made up in their mind that if they don’t want to learn, they would just let them sit in the back.”
He said at the time he hoped the staff at the dorms would attempt to help the kids do homework, catch up and improve their scores “but that’s not what happened.”
Leitka believes many things haven’t changed in education for Native students.
“I don’t think that there’s much change since then. I think it’s kind of the same way, in a way, because Albuquerque school districts is really having problems, and I worked for APS for a while, I planned to make some impact.” Letta said.
He believed that because he had earned a doctorate from New Mexico State, he had credibility with the PED. With his collection of academic statistics from all over the state, he created graphs supporting his ideas to improve the academic performance of Native American Students.
“I stood up, and I said, these are the problems, and this is what I want to do. I almost had to tell them, damn it, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it right,” Leitka said.
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After he graduated, he left and went on to help Native American junior colleges that were getting started all over the country.
“I went to Washington, DC, and I kind of lost track of academic programs for Native Americans in the state of New Mexico,” Leitka said.
Even though it’s been decades the disparities still bother him, “but you know, what can a little guy like me do anymore?”
The teacher
Judy Lovelace, now 79, was in her third year of teaching when she had a class of fifteen kindergarten Navajo students at the Magdalena Schools in the 1968-1969 school year.
Reflecting on the dorms, she felt it must have been challenging for the Alamo students.
“I didn’t see anything going on at the dorm, which is probably where some things that weren’t good were going on. So I can’t speak to that,” Lovelace said.
She recalled her classroom of five-year-olds as being extremely shy and afraid which led her to use unorthodox methods to help them learn English.
“I started bringing my dog. They were not afraid of my dog and they got to where they weren’t afraid of me,” Lovelace said “I took my dog to class every day, and the kids could play with the dog as long as they were practicing English.”
She said in her class, students were not paddled or punished for speaking Navajo, but in order to play with the dog, her rule was they had to use English.
Lovelace said she and the other teachers weren’t given any training on teaching Navajo kids English.
“I was a young teacher. All I knew was that I was going to do my very best with these 15, five-year-olds,” Lovelace said. “That was basically my philosophy with these children, as long as we’re playing games and they’re having a good time, then they are going to be learning,”
She said that when she had the class take turns being the teacher, she would play the student, and the kids would try to teach her words in Navajo.
“They would laugh and laugh and laugh because I would say these words that were supposed to be naughty, and then I couldn’t say them right,” Lovelace said.
She acknowledged that the situation was not ideal for Alamo kids.
“I thought it was pretty tough. Really, pretty tough. It’s so much better that they have a school there now. And you know, everybody is more on board about keeping their culture intact, but still learning English,” Lovelace said.
After one year at the Magdalena schools, she got married and left the school. Eventually, she went back to teaching and taught for 25 years in Socorro, Corona, and Albuquerque. She now resides in her family home in Socorro.
