AUTHOR'S MEMOIR DETAILS LIFE ON THE PUEBLO.

Byline: ANNE CONSTABLE

In 1929, the federal government shipped some boys' shoes to the San Diego Mission School at Jemez Pueblo. They were too small to fit any of the students, so younger boys were asked to come and try them on. One pair fit 6-year-old Joe S. Sando, and he was allowed to start school -- several years before most children in his age group.

Sando recalled recently that he laced up the high-top, brown leather shoes, and his moccasins were packed into a box because now "I was wearing shoes, not moccasins."

Sando was born into the Sun clan at Jemez Pueblo in 1923 and was named Paa Pah by his father's family and Tabrwagkin on his mother's side. After graduating from eighth grade at the mission school, he was sent to the Santa Fe Indian School, where his older sister, Lupe, was teaching. When he arrived there in 1937, Sando wrote in a new memoir, "I had seen very little of the outside world away from Pueblo life. While today most of the Pueblo Indian kids are exposed to the world and its often-strange activities on television, my generation had none of these experiences. For instance, I was surprised when I went to my first school football game and saw cheerleaders yelling and jumping and doing cartwheels. They were saying something in a language that I could not understand."

Sando will sign copies of

his memoir, Pueblo Recollections: The Life of Paa Pah, at

2 p.m. Sunday at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Although the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs prepared Indian students for life on the reservation -- and not for mainstream America -- when Sando was a student, he went on to attend what is now New Mexico Highlands University after graduating from the mission school. His woodworking instructor, George Pacheco -- who went back to using his original name, Blue Spruce -- "told us about college," Sando said. "He thought we were smart enough to carry college-level courses. Nobody (else) ever encouraged us or told us about it. But he had an idea we would make it."

Sando left Highlands after two semesters and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943. As a yeoman aboard the USS Corregidor, he worked as a typist, relaying messages from the ship's gunnery officer on the bridge to gun captains along the catwalks. In 35 months in the wartime Navy, he did not fire or touch a gun in either boot camp or aboard ship.

After military service, Sando enrolled at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales on the GI Bill, graduating in 1949, and then took at job at Verde Valley School in Sedona, Ariz., where he met his wife, Louisa Parker. They have three children.

Sando subsequently became the boys' adviser at the Santa Fe Indian School before he was accepted into a graduate program in audiology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

He was interested in the new field because of a wartime injury that caused him to have dizzy spells. He later worked for Lovelace in Albuquerque as an audiologist.

Sando was director of the Institute of Pueblo Study and Research at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. He taught Pueblo Indian history at the Institute of American Indian Arts and The University of New Mexico. He was first chairman of the All Indian Pueblo Council and received the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. He is the author of several books on Pueblo history, including Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History; Pueblo Profiles: Cultural Identity through Centuries of Change and Nee Hemish: A History of Jemez Pueblo. He is co-author, with Herman Agoya of Ohkay Owingeh, of Po'pay: Leader of the First American Revolution.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or [e-mail].