Spend a week in south Scottsdale and you’ll start to notice the names. Children go to Navajo, Yavapai, Hohokam, Pueblo and Tonalea. The splash pad is at Paiute Park, the soccer field at Apache Park. Further north are Cherokee, Cochise, Sequoya and Anasazi, and McCormick Ranch has Comanche, Shoshone and Zuni parks. Hardly any of these peoples ever lived on this ground, and nobody posts a sign explaining why the names are here.
Several of our own park guides answer that question, and we think they mostly get it wrong. Our Apache Park, Zuni Park, Comanche Park, Shoshone Park and Pima Park pages put the names down to a 1960s–70s developer or subdivision habit: Western color sprinkled across a map. For the parks in south Scottsdale, the evidence points somewhere else. The names began with the school district, and the parks took them from the schools next door.
What the record actually says
Two independent sources say the same thing. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s history of local schools describes the postwar building boom this way: “In this school-building era, the Scottsdale School Board made two key decisions: Students should be able to walk to a neighborhood elementary school and schools should have names honoring Native American traditions.”
The second is the Scottsdale Artists’ School, which now occupies the 1928 Scottsdale Grammar School at Second Street and Marshall Way. Its building history says that “during the early 1950s, when the Scottsdale School District was growing by leaps and bounds, the School District decided to name its schools with Native American names,” and that is when Scottsdale Grammar School became Loloma. (Loloma is also the surname of the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, who opened a studio in Scottsdale in 1954. The school was not named for him; it had been standing since 1928.)
So the policy is documented, and so is its timing. What neither source has is the board’s own wording, the date of the vote, or who proposed it. The phrase “honoring Native American traditions” is the Historical Society’s summary, not a quotation from the minutes.
The roll call, in order
The district put the rule to work at the pace the subdivisions demanded. The city’s 2012 historic context (“A Modern Dynamic City, 1961–1979”) reproduces the district’s list of schools opened through 1979, and the Historical Society gives its own version. The two lists sometimes differ by a year, probably because one counts calendar years and the other school years. Here is the city’s version:
- 1955: Tavan (February), Kachina (December)
- 1956: Ingleside (the name of the old resort and the district around it)
- 1957: Tonto (February), then Kiva in 1957–58
- 1958–59: Kaibab and Tonalea
- 1959–60: Pima, Supai and Arcadia High
- 1960–61: Hohokam, Hopi and Navajo
- 1961–62: Yavapai, Paiute (November 1961) and Coronado High
- 1962–63: Mohave
- 1965–66: Cocopah, and Apache (February 1966)
- 1966–67: Saguaro High
- 1970–71: Pueblo
- 1972–73: Chaparral High
- 1974–75: Cherokee
The Historical Society’s account carries the pattern forward: Cochise in 1980, then Anasazi (1986), Laguna (1987), Sequoya (1988), Zuni (1989) and Aztec (1993).
Not every name is a nation. Some are words from Pueblo religious life: a kiva is a ceremonial chamber and kachinas are spirit beings. Others are places in northern Arizona. Supai is the village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon that serves as the capital of the Havasupai Reservation. Kaibab is the plateau on the canyon’s North Rim. Tonalea is a community on the Navajo Nation in Coconino County, called Tó Nehelį́į́h in Navajo. Hohokam is the archaeologists’ name for the people who dug the canals Scottsdale’s farms later reused. Cochise and Sequoya are people, a Chiricahua Apache leader and the Cherokee scholar. Nobody we found has recorded what Tavan refers to, or why the board chose Tonalea, a small community far to the north. The high schools took Spanish and desert names instead: Coronado, Saguaro, Chaparral.
How the names got onto the parks
Look at where the parks are. Several of them sit on or beside schools with the same name.
- Paiute Park wraps around the Paiute Neighborhood Center at 66th Street and Osborn Road. The center is the old school. Paiute Elementary opened at 6515 E. Osborn in November 1961 and closed in 1980–81, and the city’s table notes it became a neighborhood center.
- Apache Park, at 1201 N. 85th Place, is about a block from the address of the old Apache school, 1170 N. 86th Way. That school opened in February 1966, closed in 1978–79, and later became a Rio Salado College site.
- Pima Park, at 8600 E. Thomas Road, is about half a mile from the Pima school campus at 8330 E. Osborn, which the district opened in 1959–60.
- Aztec Park is listed at 13636 N. 100th Street. That is the address of the district campus now called Cheyenne Traditional School. The Historical Society dates an Aztec school to 1993. That the campus was Aztec before it became Cheyenne seems very likely, but we have not confirmed it.
The pattern makes sense. When a city builds a neighborhood park next to a neighborhood school, both serve the same families, often on shared ground. That’s the same walk-to-school logic the board put on paper, and the park picks up the name everyone already uses for that corner. The school names are on record from 1961 and 1966, and we found nothing showing either park is older than its school.
What’s confirmed, what’s likely, and what we can’t explain
Confirmed: In the 1950s the Scottsdale school board adopted Native names for its schools as a deliberate policy, and it renamed Loloma under that policy. Two separate sources say so, and the names appear in the district’s own chronology from 1955 on.
Confirmed: Paiute Park shares its campus with the former Paiute school, and Apache Park is a block from the former Apache school. Those schools opened in 1961 and 1966.
Likely, not confirmed: That the city named these parks after the schools, under some kind of joint-use arrangement with the district. We found no city record of a park-naming decision, and no joint-use agreement online.
Not explained by the school theory: Comanche, Shoshone and Zuni parks in McCormick Ranch. The ranch was master-planned from 1971, and none of the three names appears among the district’s schools through 1979. The Historical Society lists a Zuni school opening in 1989, but we could not place it near Zuni Park. For these three, the developer explanation in our park guides may well be right. The likeliest story is that a convention the school board started in the 1950s had become, by the 1970s, simply how things were named in Scottsdale, and the McCormick Ranch planners followed it. That is a guess, and we’re labeling it as one.
Who chose, and why: Unknown. There is no record that the board consulted any tribe. That includes the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the district’s eastern edge, whose children attended Scottsdale district schools until 1974, according to a 2000 Arizona Republic report. Of all the names on the list, Pima is nearly the only one that refers to the actual neighbors, the Akimel O’odham, and Hohokam to their ancestors. No school was named for the Piipaash, the Community’s other people.
The same instinct showed up again in civic buildings. Bennie Gonzales modeled the council chamber of City Hall, dedicated in 1968, on a kiva. The Scottsdale of the 1950s and ’60s liked to borrow Native forms and words. It rarely asked anyone first.
Where the rest of the answer is
The documents that would settle this exist. They just aren’t online.
- Scottsdale Unified School District governing board minutes, about 1950 to 1961. The vote on the naming policy, who moved it and what they said should all be there. Ask the district office (8500 E. Jackrabbit Road) about historical board records. The Arizona State Archives also holds school-district reports.
- The Scottsdale Progress, 1950s. The town weekly covered the board, and a new school’s name was news. The run is at the library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection in the Civic Center Library.
- City of Scottsdale Parks and Recreation files on the naming and siting of Paiute, Apache and Pima parks, and any joint-use agreements with the district. The City Clerk holds council minutes and resolutions.
- The Scottsdale Historical Society, which wrote the clearest account of the policy and may have the source behind it.
If you have a 1950s Progress clipping about a school being named, or you sat on a PTA that weighed in, the Historical Society wants to hear from you, and so do we.
A practical footnote
Once you know the pattern, it works as a map. In south Scottsdale, a park with a tribal name usually means a school, past or present, within a few hundred yards, and that tells you what the park was built for: walk-up ballfields, a playground at the end of the school day, ramadas for the neighborhood. The schools that closed in the late 1970s and early ’80s, as the first generation of children grew up, explain why some of these parks now share a block with a neighborhood center or a college site instead of a school. The Scottsdale High School story is the same enrollment wave, seen from the other end, and the Little Red Schoolhouse and Coronado School story is where the district’s naming, and its record, begin.