
The way the school saw it, it was devil worship.
In October 2019, three teenage girls were punished for participating in a spiritual ceremony. Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning, citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.
Caitlyn, now 18, says she and her friends were disciplined for participating in a Sunrise Dance, a traditional Native ceremony at the core of White Mountain Apache culture.
The Monday after the dance, Caitlyn’s parents told her to stay home that day. They had received a call from East Fork Lutheran school telling them not to send their daughter in. She didn’t know why. Then around noon, her mom got another phone call. The principal wanted to meet with Caitlyn, her parents and the local preacher. The principal and preacher also invited the two other girls and their families to their own private meetings with school leadership.
At the start of each meeting, the families were chastised for participating in the dance. Caitlyn remembers her mother telling the principal and preacher how hypocritical they were to say the Apache people were not praying to God. “In the Bible, God himself says to come to me in all sorts,” she argued. “The dance is also a prayer; it’s another way.”
The leadership of the school, on the Fort Apache Reservation, disagreed with that interpretation and used pictures of the event posted on Facebook as evidence for their expulsions.
The other two girls were immediately given letters of expulsion. Caitlyn was just given a warning. “I knew that I was already one of the principal’s favorites,” she says. “I think they just gave me a second chance, but they gave me a strong warning not to have a dance.”
At the time, her private school’s teachers were mostly white people who would often discuss the satanic nature of Apache traditions. When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.
But these expulsions felt different. Watching other girls get publicly exiled from their school community meant that fear soon took root, cracking the foundation of Apache pride her family had worked to build beneath her.
Caitlyn finished her eighth-grade year at East Fork Lutheran school and then moved on to a school off the reservation, but the damage was done. For the next four years, Caitlyn struggled to integrate into her Apache culture. She explained: “I didn’t allow myself to engage or talk about my culture,” she says. “Even after I graduated, I had that paranoia that I would get in trouble for talking about or participating in it.”
…Just last year, the youngest of her three children attending the school came home from East Fork and asked: “Mom, did you know that when you go to Sunrise Dances, you are worshiping false idols?”
Maria was shocked. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“My teacher. She said watching the Crown Dancers is worshiping Satan.”
To hear this – and for her daughters to be told such insulting falsehoods – was mind-blowing. “Our ceremonies are what we were blessed with, our language, our everything,” Maria said. “Those are the things we were blessed with to be Apache people. So I try to explain it to them in a way where they understand: no, we’re not doing anything bad here. We’re not.”
Maria described feeling powerless – like she was hitting a wall in speaking to church leaders. (The Guardian received no answer from Wels after asking about Maria’s experience.)
All the while, her kids were wading in uncertainty about the nature of their cultural identities. Were they evil if they participated in ceremonies, or was it permitted? Who was right?
“I felt like the longer I kept them at the school, the more confused they were,” Maria said.
Still, she hoped to keep them there because the classroom setting was good. The student-to-teacher ratio was small. They received guaranteed attention by their teachers and a thorough education.
When it came time for registration, Maria did not receive any notification from the school. It finally notified her two weeks before the school year started that her children would not be invited back. She had to move them to the public school. “Now that they’re in a public school, and they’ve adjusted to it, they are more proud of their traditions or culture, they’re more proud of who they are,” she said.

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