I was five. And my brother was there already. And my uncle, my aunt. And we just had a close-knit family. My mom was having children when her mother was [still] having children, so I have uncles that are the same age and younger than me. So we had lots of cousins to play with and uncles and aunts. And then when I was nine years old, my parents were introduced to the Indian Placement Program by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they thought that that would be the best opportunity to get an education rather than the boarding school. So we were sent up here to Utah. And my sister was put in a home here in Provo, and then I was sent to Fillmore with another family. And I was there for five years. And she was here in two different homes, and she graduated from Spanish Fork High School. And then I graduated from Provo High, because my family that I originally went with—my foster dad was a teacher—and he was accepted to a master’s program at Notre Dame, and I could not go with them.
And so then I went with another family. And I graduated from Provo High, and I went to BYU.
The boarding school experience—like I said, I had a lot of family there. My aunts and my uncles, and then my brother, my sisters. And so when there was problems, or I felt homesick, I knew where to go—they were there. Whereas on the Placement Program, we were separated by miles. And that was a little bit more difficult. But I could see that there was reason that my parents had sent us on this Placement Program. Because education, from a very young age, was stressed for us—that they wanted us to become better. My mom only went to eighth grade. My dad never learned how to read or write, and he never went to school. And so he knew how to speak English, but he’d rather speak Navajo. And so there were several times when my sisters and I—my siblings—we tried to sit down with dad to teach him how to read. And he just said, “No, no, no, it’s okay. I don’t need to read. I just need to know how to sign my name and go from there.”