AFT members defend students and tribal culture
By Annette Licitra
The Rio Grande rushes alongside San Felipe Pueblo’s main village, a sacred place with an adobe church, its great wooden door framed on either side by a life-size fresco of a horse. Founded in 1706, north of Albuquerque, N.M., and the Sandia Mountains, the pueblo is a place where people know one another, where elders are revered and where no photographs are allowed.
On the other side of the river is San Felipe Elementary School. Here, AFT members instill in their students the Keres language and Katishtyameh culture. In the school’s light-filled art room, about 20 students prepare pottery with native designs to be fired in a kiln. Books, rugs and art, all speaking to native history, fill every hall and classroom.
The low-slung school buildings mimic the pueblo itself, the same sandy-colored walls dotted with bright native designs. And one step outside brings you into the natural environment of desert and mountains. A low wall is embedded with student-designed tiles of flora and fauna: bison, flowers, feathers, bears, eagles, and of course, the bright New Mexico sun.
But even in the midst of this natural beauty, trouble looms. It’s old trouble, rearing up again in the form of the federal government of the United States.
As union leader Sue Parton tells it, the government promised to care for Native Americans in exchange for taking their land. She greets visitors in Kiowa, her native language from the Great Plains, and describes her role as president of the Federation of Indian Service Employees. More than 80 percent of FISE members nationwide are affiliated with native tribes. “That was eye-opening, even for me,” says the former math teacher, “because each tribal culture is different.”
FISE represents about 6,000 federal employees across 22 states, including Alaska, Montana and North Dakota, and their message to Americans is that the rural way of life is worth fighting for. They work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in education and other public services like natural resources and public safety, in places with names like Lame Deer and Turtle Mountain. For our part, the AFT is committed to collaborating with partners to make sure rural communities have equal access to education, healthcare, reliable public services, and an environment where people can gather, break bread and share stories.
FISE is one of three AFT affiliates for federal workers, the others being the Overseas Federation of Teachers and the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Milwaukee. Early this year, hundreds of FISE members were caught in a partial shutdown of the federal government set off by President Trump’s refusal to accept adequate spending levels for some government agencies. The shutdown stopped members’ paychecks and squeezed their family budgets, with one of the only sources of relief coming from our union as the AFT offered members short-term loans to tide them over.
The shutdown hurt federal workers nationwide but hit Native American communities especially hard because their economies are tied so closely to treaties with the U.S. government and because they are located in mostly rural, isolated regions. What’s more, the Trump administration has taken a series of steps to restrict federal workers’ unions. For example, Trump’s executive orders, currently tangled up in court, would cut back dramatically on the “release time” members use to conduct their union duties.
“Working for the federal government, there’s just such an atmosphere of fear,” says Parton, a 42-year public employee. “You hear about a federal office that used to have six workers. Now it will have only two, and they still have to provide all the same services. We’re worried about what more damage Trump can do — government agencies are vacating critical positions that they’re not refilling, especially in law enforcement, where our members have to travel miles and miles just to answer a 911 call.”
Now the prospect of a shutdown looms again. Even though the House has set some budget numbers for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, and Congress will probably pass a stopgap funding measure to keep programs going until January, another impasse can’t be ruled out, even in an election year.
Fighting to fund their future
At San Felipe Pueblo Elementary School, Marie Acoya and AFT members like her work hard to keep children tethered to their traditions and untethered from their phones. The school counselor began her career as a teaching assistant and continued her education to become a counselor. She works with students, families and staff in her pueblo, one of about two dozen pueblo villages in New Mexico, offering counseling in her native Keres language, in English or a combination. The appropriate choice of language is especially helpful to very young students.
With about 300 students, the school has faced severe staff shortages. Last school year, short-staffing was particularly bad for the lone bus driver who ferried kids to and from school in shifts. This robbed children of teaching time, as classes had to await the arrival of not only San Felipe children but also some students from Santo Domingo Pueblo to the north.
The school lacks a librarian; a paraprofessional is filling in. Another empty position, for a sports coach, is held by a para as well. The school kitchen has two vacancies, one of them a supervisor who also was a bus driver. One custodian position remains vacant. A special education teacher’s departure made for a tough loss because he was a union steward. And those 20 kids in pottery class? They were meeting on a Saturday because that was their instructor’s only chance to teach art — she filled in during the week in another teaching capacity.
“It’s taking the Bureau of Indian Education a lot of time to fill positions,” Acoya says. Her school lost a job candidate who had taught there before and pulled herself out of consideration because the hiring process took too long. Like so many schools across the country, San Felipe needs enough funding to give its teachers the freedom to teach and its support staff the freedom to care.
This urgent need for resources is why members of AFT New Mexico banded together and built their power to win elections and pass major new legislation to make desperately needed investments in public services. These members cared, showed up and voted for public officials because they know that adequate funding is critical to the future of all our children.
Until the same changes happen at the federal level, Acoya is focused on the students in front of her. “From where I sit and what I do,” she says, “I’m seeing a lot of kids impacted by technology, and major behavior changes from when I first started. Technology is good in a lot of ways, but it can be corrupting to young minds. It’s affecting kids, especially in the older grades. Bullying has always been a problem but nothing like it is today. If they use texting or social media, it makes them bolder. Look at Trump. He uses Twitter as he pleases, without consideration for the people. And the children are the same way. It’s really altering their self-control, not moderating what they want to express.”
Luckily, her school is grounded by pueblo life. Michael Romero is a school custodian who, in his free time, creates native pottery that adorns some of the school’s trophy cases. And San Felipe is a community school with a separate, tribally run health clinic that serves students during school hours for basic healthcare, including vision and dental. A pediatrician volunteers twice a week. “He does care. I know him,” Acoya says. And the school can refer students to an equine organization in nearby Algodones that does horse therapy for children.
Fighting for a better life
For Joe Abeita, working in higher education at a tribal college and becoming more active in the union unites his goals for a better life, a voice at work and a better future for his tribe, the Kewa. “I was never part of the union until I had an awful boss,” he says. “I knew Sue Parton. She always let me know that if I wanted to be a union steward, I could.”
After Abeita joined the union, his boss stopped verbally abusing him. Now, more than 15 years later, Abeita still works at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, helping run residential halls and recreation programs, with wide-ranging responsibilities, from designing fitness programs to organizing intramural sports and leading hiking or fishing outings along local river trails.
He still studies the union’s collective bargaining agreement to help himself and about 100 other employees the union represents on campus. Their union contract, he says, “seems so foreign to them.” Back when he went to college, Abeita studied tribal law and labor law, both of which have served him well. “One of the things I do enjoy about my union role,” he says, “is that when an issue comes up, sometimes it just takes a conversation to resolve it.”
Another thing Abeita loves about his job is connecting with students from hundreds of tribes all over the Americas. “I have a vast network,” says Abeita, who is fluent in Keres and grew up in the Santo Domingo Pueblo about 40 miles north of Albuquerque, near San Felipe.
He loved helping send truckloads of food and supplies to the Standing Rock Sioux in 2016 during their “awesome but dangerous” pipeline protests in North Dakota. And he loves providing an extra dose of TLC to students from isolated tribes who suffer from high rates of substance abuse and depression. “When we get students from Canada and Alaska, we have to take special care because of the way they’ve been treated,” he says, “but just a little more attention, because we care for all our students.”
Fighting for freedom to live securely
The freedoms Americans enjoy, and the rights workers have fought for, are not automatically given, says Jim Gertner, a math teacher at Wingate High School in Fort Wingate, N.M., and secretary-treasurer of FISE. The anti-union Janus Supreme Court decision is significant in many states, he adds, but federal workers never were compelled to pay their fair share for union representation, and sometimes recruiting members on the reservation can be challenging.
Most of the difficulty is geographic — for example, the Navajo region where Gertner works is spread out over Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and members on the Havasupai reservation live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, accessible only by helicopter or donkey. “In the remote areas, that’s where we have a lot of trouble filling positions, just because they’re so remote,” he says, explaining that some of his members, mainly school employees and law enforcement officers, may have to take a week or two of vacation just to get out and buy groceries and supplies, and to take care of personal business: “These employees are going above and beyond what is normally expected.”
Sue Parton feels that Trump could have avoided the government shutdown, that his motives were simply punitive. “We don’t want no damn wall,” she says. “And to do a shutdown right before Christmas, that was horrible.” It wasn’t Native Americans’ idea to become dependent on the federal government, she observes. When the shutdown came, it “broke my heart” because by treaty, natives have to rely on the government. Some tribes couldn’t clear their roads of snow, and members in South Dakota suffered health crises because emergency workers couldn’t reach the reservations.
By contrast, she says, “the AFT was really good in helping us.” As her members who work in corrections and law enforcement went unpaid, Parton received a phone call from AFT President Randi Weingarten, who told her that our union could obtain short-term loans for FISE members, with no interest and no credit check. “The union had our backs,” Parton says. “We’re through it now, but the ramifications are still being felt.”
Annette Licitra is a staff writer for the American Federation of Teachers.
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