They played basketball for the Thunderbirds. They spoke in their Indigenous languages in a crowded dormitory. Overseen by a faculty largely made up of nuns, they cleaned the chapel floors and recited the rosary, sometimes in their traditional Native regalia.

“Him and I joined the service together,” said Dasheno, 79, a former Santa Clara Pueblo governor, pointing out a former classmate in the photo, a boy from San Ildefonso Pueblo. “He went into aviation, and I became a radio man.”

A raging fire that ripped through the historic St. Catherine Indian School campus last week — claiming the iconic main building, the girls dormitory and the chapel — was painful for Dasheno and many other former students. Officials have not determined what caused the July 2 blaze at the long-vacant property north of downtown Santa Fe. A partial demolition began Friday to provide investigators with safer access to the building where they believe the fire ignited.

St. Catherine, which served students in grades 7-12, was a private boarding school for more than a century before its final graduation ceremony in 1998. Named for St. Catherine of Siena and founded by a woman who would later be known as Mother Katharine Drexel, it was run for decades by women who joined Drexel’s religious order and focused on educating Indigenous youth.

The Catholic school, founded in 1886, had a complicated history, entangled in part in the legacy of trauma caused by federal and church-run boarding schools for Native children and teens in the 19th and 20th centuries — institutions designed to culturally assimilate kids who were forced to enroll. But many former students of St. Catherine, especially in its last several decades of operation, speak of cherished memories and defend the school — known to some as St. Kate’s — as a beloved community.

The July 2 fire dealt a devastating blow to the campus, which housed storied buildings bearing priceless murals, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Love for the Indian Race by Edward O’Brien — which showed the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by images of Native people.

The Historic Santa Fe Foundation describes St. Catherine Indian School on its website as “a remnant of a contested system of Indian boarding schools, run by missionaries of various Christian religious orders, first developed in nineteenth century New Mexico to educate, assimilate, and ‘civilize’ indigenous children into Euro-American culture.”

Others remember it as a different kind of Native boarding school. While the nuns could be strict and the campus environment was rigorous, former students have noted, they felt their culture was respected by school officials, and they look back at their time there with fondness.

Some Native people who attended the school also have long pointed out — at least in their experiences from the 1960s forward — their enrollment was a choice made by them or their parents rather than the federal government.

Michael Peacock, a member of Laguna Pueblo who graduated from St. Catherine in 1975, described his experiences at the school in overwhelmingly positive terms, saying it helped shape him.

His mother attended the school in the 1950s before him, and many of his classmates had family legacy ties to the school as well, he said.

“St. Catherine’s was a unique school and a wonderful, wonderful experience, I believe, for me and a majority of the people who went there,” Peacock said. “It was nothing compared to the Albuquerque Indian School or any other schools throughout the United States that abused their kids or brainwashed their kids and institutionalized their kids.”

Still, documents archived in the University of New Mexico’s digital repository show some administrators with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, which operated St. Catherine, were bent on converting Native students to Catholicism and seemed to hold attitudes dismissive of Native religions.

Take, for example, a letter penned in 1946 by an administrator with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to Archbishop Edwin Byrne of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

“There has been so little done by the Church as well as the government for the bettering of these poor wandering Navajos, the greater number of them pagans, that we have felt concerned,” the letter states, lamenting the closure of some government-run Native schools.

The letter, citing the potential construction of a new high school for Navajo youth, outlines an effort to “win as many Souls as we could through the mission of God and His glory.”

Jean Marquardt, who was president of St. Catherine for two years in the mid-1990s, said she sees the school within the context of Catholic boarding schools that “ravished” aspects of Indigenous culture.

When she was president, she said, about 80% of the 200 students were Native American.

“In terms of academics, I think they did a very good job, but in terms of acknowledging the history of Indian boarding schools, they were very neglectful,” added Marquardt, who now lives in California.

“They did not acknowledge the trauma that generations of Pueblo and Navajo people went through in the early 1800s because of the policy of Manifest Destiny, and kids were kidnapped from their homes and brutally taken to these Indian schools,” she said.

Former congresswoman and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo, the Democratic nominee for governor, led the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate the troubled history of Native boarding schools. The effort led to a historic apology by former President Joe Biden for the federal government’s role in such schools.

Haaland in January 2025 wrote about listening to Biden’s apology months earlier at the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. In the same reflection, still posted on the Department of Interior’s website, she also wrote about her grandmother’s experience at St. Catherine.

“I remembered my grandma Helen recount the story of when she was taken away to St. Catherine’s Indian Boarding School in Santa Fe, New Mexico,” Haaland wrote. “She told me about the day a priest from the Pueblo of Laguna came to our village of Mesita, ‘gathered up the kids,’ put them on a train, and sent them away. She was 8 years old at the time.”

Haaland said in a statement to The New Mexican last week the recollection was an accurate description of her grandmother’s experience. She went on to describe the impact the boarding school had on her family.

“Because my grandma’s dad only had a horse and buggy, he was only able to visit my grandma once in the 5 years that she was at St. Catherine’s,” Haaland said in the statement. “Many parents were forced to be without their children for long periods of time, and all children are impacted when that happens. My grandma was always deeply religious, and she said the rosary every night.”

Haaland’s grandparents met at the boarding school, she said.

“I know the school changed a lot over the years, so it’s important to recognize that the fire and loss of part of this school is felt differently across the community,” she said. “Losing a part of history is always difficult, because we must learn all of that history in order to grow and build better communities.”

For those who treasured their days at St. Kate’s, memories are flooding back of raucous basketball games where the Thunderbirds played hard and established rivalries with Pojoaque Valley and Los Alamos schools.

They remember the pleasure in beating teams from larger schools with taller players.

Walter Dasheno unfurled a school sweater with “Thunderbirds” on the back. It had belonged to his late wife, Judy Dasheno, a former St. Catherine student who died from COVID-19 during the pandemic.

He enrolled at St. Catherine as a seventh grader.

“It developed a cadre of young men and young women who went on to become successful in their lives, some of them becoming lawyers, doctors, attorneys, tribal leaders for their communities, health program directors,” Dasheno said. “And then, of course, others became successful in the arts and then, in a traditional sense, going back to their communities and becoming traditional people.”

He was in rock ’n’ roll bands that sprang up on the campus, including one called the Thundertones, influenced by surf rock and the Beatles. Dasheno played saxophone and clarinet.

He recalled the music’s echoes in the old school gym and the merriment of his high school years.

Peacock also arrived as a seventh grader. Though he was homesick in the early days, he grew to love St. Catherine so much he didn’t want to leave as a graduating senior.

He recalled his first couple of stays in the dormitory, a crowded room filled with bunk beds, hearing the voices and languages of Native students from around the Southwest. Some of his good friends were from the Navajo and Apache nations.

“Those first nights, I remember the soft murmur of conversations in many languages and the feeling that I had joined something bigger than myself — a community woven together by tradition, learning, and shared experience,” he wrote in a reflection posted on a website devoted to the preservation of St. Catherine Indian School.

Downtown Santa Fe was his second classroom, he wrote: “The plaza was our playground and history book all in one — the Palace of the Governors standing proud, the smell of food drifting from La Fonda, the friendly chaos inside Tiano’s Sporting Goods, and the unbeatable taste of a Woolworth’s frito pie.”