Eloisa Apachito: Taos Pueblo’s Grandmother Else

They call her Grandma Else.

Eloisa Apachito’s story is filled with the history of her country and the Taos Pueblo people. She was a surgical nurse in World War II. She helped her brother, Paul Bernal, restore the Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. She mothered other people’s children who were forced to leave their families and become Europeanized in Indian dormitories in the 1950s and 60s–children who still break into tears of gratitude when they see her, although they are now grandmothers themselves. And she has become grandmother to so many people at the Pueblo that her daughter, Carla Apachito, has gotten used to people showing up at her door asking for  “Grandma Else.”

Apachito, 90, was born in the village and grew up in the traditional way: she helped her family farm corn, wheat, and squash; she attended her younger siblings. She remembers escorting her little brother into town to pose for the Russian artist Nicolai Fechin. And she threw herself wholeheartedly into the spiritual and community life at the Pueblo.

She herself is circumspect, but her daughter eagerly speaks for her.

At the Pueblo, said Carla, they believe that they live and eat “In one basket.”

There are myriad details to celebrating and thanking Mother Earth. “We celebrate everything we get from Mother Earth. We always pay respect for what Mother Earth has provided.” That could mean tending to the details that go into a ceremony or making a garden, which Apachito does every year. The role of women in this is significant and Apachito has always taken it seriously, teaching it to her daughter, Carla, who in turn taught it to her daughter, Kayla.

“I strongly believe the Indian ceremony learned under my dad and his brother,” said Apachito. “I took part in everything.”

At age 7, Apachito began attending the Pueblo school and then moved to Santa Fe Indian School, 70 miles away, for high school. When she graduated in 1938 she worked briefly, then traveled to Lawton, Oklahoma for nursing school. Part of her schooling required working as a clinic nurse at Native American reservations, which she did in Stuart, Nevada and Chemawa, Oregon.

About 1942, she enlisted with the Women’s Army Corps and served in Staten Island, New York, as a surgical nurse, taking care of soldiers who were shipped home injured from the war.

But she missed home, so she signed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was offered a job as a surgical nurse in the Albuquerque Indian Sanitarium. Still too far away, she sought a job in Santa Fe and worked for a while at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital. There she met her husband, Frank.

For years, the couple worked together in Albuquerque and Magdalena New Mexico as supervisors in the dormitories where a government program required Native American children to live and be re-acculturated. Apachito and her husband became surrogate parents–a role to which she seems peculiarly suited.

At the dormitories so many children were forcibly orphaned; Apachito loved them. Thinking of their circumstances makes her too sad to talk about it, but to this day women she tended at the dormitory still call her.

“We were in Albuquerque,” recalled Carla, “and this woman came up to us, she had tears in her eyes. She had been in the dormitory with my mother and she said, ‘Thank you for loving us.’”

All the time she lived away, Apachito maintained her ties with the Pueblo. She drove 5 hours to get home for spiritual ceremonies, and she worked hard alongside her brother Paul Bernal, who spearheaded the effort to restore Blue Lake to the Pueblo.

The lake is believed to be the birthplace of the Pueblo people and a sacred place of worship. In 1906, the U.S. claimed the lake as part of the Forest Service. The Pueblo had to fight for more than 60 years to get it back. Bernal, Apachito’s brother, constantly accompanied by the Pueblo’s religious leader, testified before Congress and elsewhere that the appropriation of Blue Lake by the government denied freedom of religion to the Pueblo people.

Apachito handled much of her brother’s correspondence, lobbying to free the lake. She also worked at the National Congress of American Indians National Convention. Carla remembers enjoying setting up their booths and handing out the pamphlets. In 1970 president Richard Nixon signed the Blue Lake bill restoring the lake to the people.

In 1974 when her mother was ill, Apachito and her family returned to the Taos Pueblo. Carla remembers her explaining “You will always be my daughter, but I have a lot of nieces and nephews to care for, too.”

And she did.

She became the unofficial grandmother of the Pueblo, especially as she outlived so many of her friends and relatives. So, in addition to the the birth of her grandkids, Kyla and her brother Sky, Apachito has dozens of other ‘children and grandchildren’ who stop by just to visit and soak up her presence.

“It’s a magic she has,” said Carla. “I really do believe it’s magic.”