HE IS NOT ONE OF US

They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word, too. It means 'be like the white man.' I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indian ways were wrong. But they kept teaching us for seven years. And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men-burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances. I tried to learn the lessons-and after seven years I came home...

It was a warm summer evening when I got off the train at Taos station….  I went home to my family.  And the next morning the governor of the pueblo and two war chiefs and many priest chiefs came into my father’s house.  They did not talk to me; they did not even look at me.  When they were all assembled they talked to my father.

The chiefs said to my father, “Your son who calls himself Raphael has lived with the white men.  He has been far away from the pueblo.  He has not lived in the kiva [a sacred ceremonial chamber] nor learned the things that Indian boys should learn.  He has no hair.  He has no blankets.  He cannot even speak our language and he has a strange smell.  He is not one of us.”

Sun Elk in 1890 telling of his experiences returning home to the Taos (New Mexico) Pueblo from the Carlisle School seven years earlier.