Meet my hero

In 1935, Wilhelmina Phone, a five-year old Jicarilla Apache girl, was sent to a sanatorium with tuberculosis, the latest disease brought by white settlers. The Bureau of Indian Affairs ran the place, but no one understood Apache, the only language Wilhelmina spoke.

She returned to live with her parents when she recovered. “We lived in tents in the traditional way. We lived up north in the summer and moved south in October. We raised sheep and cattle,” she said.

With only an elementary education, Wilhelmina decided to go back to school. “It took four years of night school, but I got my GED in 1970,” she said. Later she took an anthropology class at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado. Then she took other classes at UNM, at Ft. Lewis College in Durango, and at San Juan College in Farmington.

In 2006, Wilhelmina Phone's dictionary of the Jicarilla language was published. Since Jicarilla was never a written language, the dictionary is an amazing feat. It took her more than thirty years. The accomplishment earned her an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico.

Doctor Phone in my classroom. To her left is Andulia Davis, a member of the St. Francis School Board and a good friend. (Duli's husband Charlie was my substitute teacher once.) To her right is Bud Meyer, principal of St. Francis.