For most Americans, high school is a chapter of life that they begin in their mid-teens and finish at the cusp of adulthood and look back on—fondly or otherwise—for the rest of their lives.
While high school may be a place of personal growth and transformation for the students who pass through its halls, the educational institution itself tends not to change all that much over the years. That has not been the case for Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California.
Lorene Sisquoc was born at the boarding school, back when the place was called Sherman Institute. Although she attended public school outside Sherman’s walls, she grew up on its campus, alongside her grandmother, who taught there, and her mother, who cleaned and monitored the dorms (the children of employees typically attended public school, a custom that lingered after the revocation of a decades-long rule that prevented them from attending the school). During the summers, she and the other employees’ kids rode their bikes and skated around the otherwise deserted 80-acre campus. “We had the run of the place,” Sisquoc says. “It was our playground.” Decades later, she teaches at Sherman and has become the keeper of its history. While Sisquoc, a member of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe and a descendant of the Cahuilla tribe, has remained on campus most of her 60 years, the school itself has undergone such a radical transformation that its founding principles—its aims and its curriculum—have been turned on their heads.
Sherman Indian High School was no ordinary high school, but a campus built
