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LaVonna Francisco places a shovelful of earth over clothes being buried at the grave of her grandmother, Pauline Miguel, on what would have been Miguel's 79th birthday. Other family members also gathered Tuesday at her grave site on the Tohono O'odham Nation. Miguel's deathbed wish was to establish a scholarship for Tohono O'odham students.
photos by Jeffry Scott
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Learn more
● For more information about the Pauline Miguel Scholarship Fund and other scholarships supported by the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, go to www.cfsoaz.org/ page17482.cfm.
● For information about other scholarships available to American Indian students, go to www.finaid.org/otheraid/ natamind.phtml.
Pauline Miguel died seven years ago knowing that her life's work would live on. But her legacy hasn't just continued through her daughters and grandchildren, whom she constantly pushed to attend school each day and work at a college degree. It's spread to other Tohono O'odham students through the Pauline Miguel Scholarship Fund.
The $1,000 scholarship has helped Tohono O'odham students pay for college expenses for seven years. Finances and emotional worries often plague American Indian students, and they often rank the lowest of all minority students in college.
But in some small way, Miguel's wish - to erase the worst stereotypes of American Indians - is helping one or two students each year ease through the monetary headache of attending college.
The scholarship may be a small part of recipients' lives, but for the three Miguel daughters who created it, it's another way to celebrate a woman who spent her life giving to others.
And in death, it seems, she is still in a giving mood. Through a medicine woman, Miguel told her family that she had given away some pieces of her clothing and that she needed new clothes. On Tuesday, which would have been Miguel's 79th birthday, the family visited her grave and buried a new set of clothes, planted fresh flowers and prayed the rosary for her.

Tucson Region

Scholarship fills wish of Tohono O'odham woman

By Jeff Commings
arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 07.23.2006
As Pauline Miguel lay on her deathbed in 1999, she looked lovingly at her eight daughters, living embodiments of one of her life's goals achieved.
From the first day her oldest daughter, Mary, went to school more than 50 years earlier, Miguel had sworn to keep her girls from making the same mistakes she made as a young Tohono O'odham student. She wanted all of them to graduate from high school instead of dropping out and living with an eighth-grade education.
That meant the girls could never miss a day of school, even if their mother had to become an abrasive drill sergeant in the early morning. It meant they couldn't be happy with earning C's in class. It meant taking it all the way to college and a degree, helped on by a daily call to their dorm rooms to make sure they weren't ditching class.
When her daughters became mothers, Miguel's grandchildren also got that forceful but loving shove onto the school bus.
The family realizes now that Miguel was trying to make sure her descendants wouldn't be subject to the worst American Indian stereotypes: lazy, illiterate and delinquent.
As the family gathered in Miguel's last days, the matriarch knew all the hard work had paid off. The Miguel girls were all high-school graduates. They had gone to college. Two had earned master's degrees. And the oldest grandchildren were doing well in college.
In a way, that was enough.
But on another level, Pauline Miguel, who would have been 79 last Tuesday, knew it really wasn't enough to motivate her family to get the best education possible. So the woman whose life was devoted to helping others came up with a final gesture.
The week before she died, she made a request of her daughters: Sell her red Nissan truck, as well as the home in Phoenix, and put the money into a scholarship to help Tohono O'odham students pay for college.
Seven years later, the Pauline Miguel Scholarship Fund is still giving $1,000 annually to a deserving student — sometimes two if the committee can't pick just one. The fund is handled by the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona.
The three daughters who contributed $4,000 each to the scholarship — Alberta Flannery, Neddie Blaine and Mary Bliss — spoke recently of a mother who never gave up on her daughters, even when they begged for just one day away from school.
"She was very pro-education," said Flannery, now 58 and a retired administrator for the Tucson Unified School District. "We never missed a day of school. Every year we'd get those little certificates on the last day of school."
What was the point, they wondered, of going to school every day? Many years later, they finally see the reason.
"I think that carries over in your work life," Flannery said.
And their mother, who attended the Tucson Indian Training School before it closed in 1960, was a shining example of community involvement.
She participated in the women's rights movements in the 1960s. She spoke on welfare rights. She helped the Tohono O'odham Nation's elderly with the creation of a nursing home.
"She always encouraged us to get involved," said Bliss, 61, a retired TUSD social worker.
O'odham students "failing"
Miguel's scholarship isn't the only grant for Tohono O'odham students. It's one of a growing number of scholarships created to help these students, who often struggle on standardized tests and attend schools that earn poor marks, too.
Schools in the Indian Oasis-Baboquivari Unified District, where many O'odham students go, regularly have more students fail the state AIMS test than pass it.
They've been labeled "failing" in state and federal accountability reports, too. And even if students make it through school, the dream of college often is washed away by lack of money.
Mary Juan, 19, last year's recipient of the Miguel Scholarship, said it would have been difficult to pay for books at the University of Arizona without the $1,000.
"Financial aid at the UA only helps you so much, and there's still a lot of things the tribe scholarship doesn't pay for," said Juan, a 2005 graduate of Baboquivari High School who is studying physiology.
American Indian students often have a tough time believing they can succeed in college, said Maria Valencia, field coordinator in the Native American Education Program in the Sunnyside Unified School District.
"They're very shy," said Valencia, who has worked with American Indian students in Sunnyside for 10 years. "They're really the minority in the big schools. They're just a speck in a sea of blond and red hair, and for some of them, that's very uncomfortable."
Those who have spent their entire lives on the reservation find less help with school, too, Valencia said, though she noted that's changing.
"Deep in the reservation, there aren't enough libraries and resources to become successful," she said. "Sometimes, they believe they aren't going to make it, and that's when you have to guide them."
About 4 percent of Sunnyside's 16,800 students are American Indian, the third-largest ethnic group in the district. Some 43 percent of American Indian students in Sunnyside graduated in 2003, the most recent data available.
In the Indian Oasis-Baboquivari district, 99 percent of students are American Indian and 43 percent graduate.
To qualify for Miguel's scholarship, applicants write an essay about their community outreach projects and academic accomplishments as well as what they expect to do with a college degree.
Applicants also need to have a GPA of at least 2.5. The sisters — who aren't involved in picking the recipients — said their mother wouldn't stand for her money to go to a student who was just getting by.
"She always emphasized the importance of hard work," Blaine said. "She never liked seeing people just sitting in front of the TV."
● Contact reporter Jeff Commings at 573-4191 or at jcommings@azstarnet.com.
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