What it means
Indian School Road is the east-west street through the heart of Old Town. It crosses Scottsdale Road at the center of downtown, runs past the Civic Center and the ballpark, and reaches the Greenbelt at Indian School Park on Hayden. On the grid it is 4100 North, a mile south of Camelback; on the whole it is 41 miles long, from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the east to the White Tank Mountains on the west. Locals say “Indian School” and mean the road, the 101 exit and, in Scottsdale, the line between downtown’s bar district and its gallery district.
The name is older than the city and heavier than it sounds. It was the road from Phoenix to the Phoenix Indian School, a federal boarding school that opened in 1891 on 160 acres at Central Avenue, nine miles west of Scottsdale, and operated for 99 years. For its first four decades the school’s purpose was assimilation: Native children from across Arizona and beyond, including the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash of the reservation at the road’s east end, were brought there to lose their languages and learn trades. Scottsdale drivers pass the name a dozen times a day without hearing it.
Where you’ll meet it
Every address in Old Town’s core, the 101’s Indian School exit, Valley Metro Route 41, the trolley map, and the history of Scottsdale High School, which stood on the road from 1923 until 1983.
Where the word came from
The Phoenix Indian Industrial School opened in 1891 with about 100 students on a farm north of the young city. Wikipedia’s survey of the Valley’s arterials records that the road was named “in territorial days as the road to the Phoenix Indian School,” which is as precise as the record gets; by the time Arizona became a state in 1912 the name was fixed, and the section-line road that carried it ran east across the farms to Scottsdale and the reservation line.
The school grew into the second largest in the federal system. Enrollment passed 380 by 1896, 700 by the end of the decade and 950 in 1928. Students wore uniforms, rose at five, marched to class and were drilled in English only; boys were trained for trades and farms, girls for domestic work, and an “outing” system placed them in Phoenix households as labor. Federal policy began to turn in 1931, the lower grades were dropped in 1935 and the school became a high school for grades seven through twelve. The Reagan administration recommended closure in 1982; the last 80 students left in the spring of 1990.
The land took another decade to settle. The campus passed to the City of Phoenix in a 1996 exchange involving the Barron Collier Company, which also funded a $35 million trust for Native children’s education, and the city opened Steele Indian School Park on the site in 2001. Three buildings survive, the 1902 dining hall, 1922 Memorial Hall and 1931 band building, as a National Register historic district, and the Phoenix Indian Center and Native American Connections run a visitor center in one of them, telling the school’s story from the students’ side.
What it is not
Scottsdale’s Indian School Park, at Hayden Road, has no connection to the school; it is a Greenbelt park named for the street. And the “Indian School” was never in Scottsdale. The nearest piece of that history here is the Huhugam Ki Museum on the Community, where the people the school was built to change tell their own.
The fine print
The grid number is confirmed two ways: the Phoenix Indian School’s own address was 300 East Indian School Road, four miles north of Washington Street at 4100, and Valley Metro’s Route 41 runs the road for that reason. Camelback is nine blocks north at 5000; the odd gap reflects Phoenix’s half-mile arterials south of Camelback.
In Scottsdale the road is about three miles long: from the Phoenix line at 64th Street through the Arcadia-side neighborhoods, across Scottsdale Road at the center of Old Town, past the Civic Center at Drinkwater, the Little Red Schoolhouse’s district and Scottsdale Stadium, to Hayden and the Greenbelt, then on through south-central neighborhoods to Pima Road and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where the Scottsdale name ends and the road continues onto Community land. Scottsdale High School, built in 1923 on land Charles Miller gave, stood on Indian School Road until its 61st and last class graduated in 1983; the site was razed from 1987 and redeveloped.
Nobody has proposed renaming the road, and the question has not come up the way it did for Squaw Peak. Part of the reason is that the name is a plain description, not a slur; part is that the people most entitled to object have put their energy into the visitor center and the historic district instead, so that the name keeps pointing at something. Wikipedia gives the school’s span as 1891 to 1990; one road survey says 1891 to 1991, a difference of the final administrative year. The 99-year figure is the one the school’s own historians use.