ARIZONA'S UNIQUE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL

Arizona's Unique Theological School for Native Americans Celebrates its 75th Birthday TEXT BY ROSANNE KELLER

A unique Arizona institution, Charles Cook Theological School-until recently known as Cook Christian Training School - reaches a major landmark on October 1, 1986. This learning center for Native American adults has been a quiet testimony to the message of Christianity in Arizona for seventy-five years. Its distinctive educational program has enabled Native Americans from ninety tribes across the continent to become ministers to their own people. Many of the graduates of the school have gone on to seminaries or universities and distinguished themselves in positions of leadership in both church and community.

Located since 1965 on a twenty-acre campus in Tempe, Cook School previously occupied a site opposite Phoenix Indian School after moving to Phoenix from Tucson in 1914.

The school's founder, Charles Henry Cook, was a remarkable pioneer of American Indian education whose story fits neatly into the colorful annals of the Old West. A native of Germany and a Civil War veteran of the Union Army, he was a deeply religious visionary who made his way from Chicago to Arizona Territory in 1870 intent on becoming a missionary to the Pima Indians. Ignoring warnings about the dangers involved, he traveled for four months by train, stagecoach, ox cart, and on foot. When at last he reached the Indian Agency at Sacatori, he was promptly hired to start a government school for Pimas and Maricopas, and began classes in January, 1871. Soon he was launching a banking system and improving farming techniques as well as teaching school. On Sundays and whenever otherwise needed, he served as a lay preacher.

The new Arizonan conscientiously studied Pima language and customs, and realized there was much to admire in the native culture. Early missionaries often did not recognize or value the rich spirituality of Native Americans, a people for whom the earth was sacred, for whom "life" and "religion," in harmony with nature, were synonymous. From the outset, Cook was sensitive to and appreciative of the Indians' wisdom and cosmic understanding. This respect and his desire to help preserve native cultural values as the Indians were introduced to the white man's education remained hallmarks of his professional career. In his limited spare time, Cook studied for the ministry and was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1881, thereupon becoming a full-time missionary. Realizing

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARY O'BRIEN

that the reservation was too vast to be served adequately by one minister, he started a Bible class in his home for five prospective Indian preachers.

For years Cook urged Presbyterian officials to provide for more formal education of native evangelists. Finally, on October 1, 1911, a school to prepare Indian church leaders was started in Tucson, and was named the Cook Bible School, later to become Cook Christian Training School. Its first graduating class comprised nine students, all of whom had received their first instruction in Cook's living room.

Charles Cook retired from the ministry in 1913 and died on May 4, 1917. In his more than forty years of work with the Indians, he baptized more than a thousand and established sixteen Pima, Maricopa, and Yavapai churches.

Observing the effectiveness of the educational program of Cook School, other Protestant denominations began to refer their Native American churchmen. In 1940 the school officially became interdenominational in its program and sponsorship.

Over the years, Indians and Eskimos from twenty-eight states and four Canadian provinces, and representing a dozen denominations, have attended the school. President Cecil Corbett reports that seventy percent of all ordained Native American clergy have been graduates or former students of CCTS programs. Other graduates have become tribal governors, council leaders, teachers, administrators, and community officials as well as lay leaders and youth workers in their churches. The roll of high achievers mixes names like Lewis, Foote, Snow, and Plummer with Winter Chaser, Charging Eagle, Bull Bear, and Noisy Hawk.

Dr. Corbett, a Nez Perce born on a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, is another visionary in the school's long history of educational innovators that included George Walker, George Smart, and Alonzo Spang. Himself a Cook alumnus, he became president in 1968. He has given the school flexible leadership to meet the changing needs of the Christian tribal people of contemporary America. One insight he offers concerns Indian self-awareness.

That difference requires a special approach to teaching. For one thing, the student steeped in oral tradition may not see why such importance is placed on written expression. So, along with general education courses and classes in theology, Scripture, and church history, the curriculum is designed to help students find their place in an Anglo-dominated society that puts great emphasis on recorded communication. Students are invited to share their differing cultural values and traditions, and to find ways to apply these to their interpretation and presentation of the Gospel message.

Those students who do take up residence are generally old enough to have families, and in most cases they bring their families along. The campus affords the necessary housing and the children attend neighborhood schools. Campus social life is family-oriented.

Cook students typically are returning to an academic setting for the first time in years, and their earlier education varies greatly. But entrance examinations are not part of the Cook method; students start at their own level and go from there.

As American society begins to face more squarely the need to define the conscientious individual's proper role in a troubled, technologically complex world, there is increasing appreciation that our Native Americans can help us understand the discipline of living in harmony with nature. Charles Cook Theological School, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, intends to continue to contribute to that effort.