The Teller Institute in Grand Junction, most recently the Grand Junction Regional Center, was one of 350 government-run boarding school for Indigenous children in the U.S. Itâs one of three locations under investigation on the West Slope, prompted by mass graves discovered at similar schools in Canada in May. Newspaper archives indicate at least 21 children died while attending the Teller Institute. Photo courtesy Museum of Western Colorado
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Boarding schools under investigation
When Dzabahe was 11 years old, she went to her first government-run boarding school in rural Arizona around 1953. She left everything she knew on the Navajo reservation where she grew up..
“You became an orphan on that day,” she said. “My life was a shamble because everything that I was, everything that I believed in, my language, everything, I learned I was doing it all wrong.”
At the school, she was told not to speak her Navajo language. Her Navajo clothing and moccasins were sent back h...
