Under the scratchy, synthetic material of a graduation gown, Amira Angelo will feel her Apache camp dress — a red, cotton, three-tiered flowing skirt with black ric rac.
Her blouse is made of red, white and black Hello Kitty fabric with puffy sleeves and matching detail. A sterling silver and turquoise concho belt will notch at her waist. Her beaded earrings will dangle.
Peeking out from under the skirt and graduation gown will be her orange moccasins.
The traditional outfit is what Amira wears for special occasions. And she most wanted to wear it for her Sunrise Dance — a coming-of-age ceremony for Apache girls. But she turned 13 during the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing the sacred ritual from happening. Now, she attends others’ rites of passage in her regalia.
But soon, Amira, who identifies as Tohono O’odham, Navajo and Apache, will honor the completion of her high school education at Star Academic High School by wearing her ceremonial dress, made by her grandmother.
“What’s important to me is that for graduation, what I’m wearing is my traditional camp dress with my moccasins and my jewelry,” said Amira, noting that spiritual connection feels right as she completes her public education.
Amira, 18, is one of about 2,200 Indigenous high school seniors in Arizona who will blend cultures and celebrate their achievement wearing both a graduation cap and gown and their tribal regalia.
Rules about how students can do that are guided by a 53-page toolkit from the Office of Indian Education — a department of the Arizona Department of Education — released a year ago. The formal direction came four years after a 2021 state law was passed protecting students who are part of Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribes. It says public schools cannot prevent Indigenous students from wearing tribal regalia or objects of cultural significance at graduation ceremonies.
For some Indigenous students, that includes eagle and red-tailed hawk feathers dangling from mortar boards or incorporating beadwork, stoles, shells and rocks.
At least 20 states have similar laws to protect Indigenous students. When New Mexico became the 20th just over a year ago, Arizona took notice, said Elaine Mollindo, a professional learning specialist in the Office of Indian Education.
New Mexico was prompted to act after a Hunkpapa Lakota graduate in Farmington was told by administrators she must remove her cap — embellished with a feather plume — to walk across the stage and get her diploma. She was given a plain cap instead.
The event was recorded on video and the Navajo Nation Council, which has tribal land in Arizona too, admonished the school district.
So far this graduation season, no concerns have been emailed or called into the Office of Indian Education, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues, Mollindo said.
“This year we also learned there is still so much misinformation with both families and schools,” Mollindo said via text message. “So OIE will continue to promote best practices to both schools and families: Notify your school of your intention to wear regalia ASAP and for schools to notify their school community of their procedure around ARS 15-348 early and often.”
Creating the toolkits
In Arizona, schools and school districts monitor tribal regalia and how it’s worn. Mollindo helps them do that, including up-to-the-minute guidance via phone and email on graduation days.
The toolkits — one for students and another for school districts — give everyone a common document “speaking the same language,” Mollindo said, to help each group’s understanding and interpretation of state law.
“(The toolkits) also support both groups in their decision making so they know what steps to take to make this choice a partnership instead of it feeling like opposition,” she said. “This is also an opportunity to educate Arizona about our tribes and what exercising tribal sovereignty looks like.”
As a descendant of the Colorado Indian Tribes and the Chemehuevi, Mollindo and her team assembled research, recommendations and resources for wearing tribal regalia at commencement ceremonies.
“It’s great when you get something into policy, but how is the rest of the community going to translate that?” Mollindo said.
The toolkits bridge state policy with cultural traditions, but getting things off the ground was a slow process, Mollindo said.
About 84,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million students identify with 210 federally recognized tribes, according to Arizona Department of Education data. Including tribal schools, which are not part of the Arizona Department of Education, Arizona’s student population would be about 10% Indigenous, the data shows.
Tribal information gathering took months, Mollindo said.
“We want to make sure that we get the voices of as many people as we can. So, we started out with a survey that went out to all 22 tribes asking, ‘Are you willing to give us information about what your regalia might look like at graduation?’” she said.
“We recognize that’s not the way our tribal communities work. We get together. We talk as relatives. We look each other face to face and we share photos, maybe through our cell phones.”
They started to build trust explaining the toolkits and asking for photos face-to-face over nearly a year, Mollindo said.
“There were also community members that didn’t feel safe. They said ‘If we show you what our regalia is to look like, then that could be limiting. Then people will think it has to look like that,’” she said. “We let them know that the reason we were trying to find so many different examples was so that we could show the diversity, but also be really intentional with our wording, where the wording wouldn’t be limiting.”
The toolkits are peppered with images of students celebrating and wearing tribal regalia. All faces are blurred. Sections on jewelry, eagle feathers and plumes, clothing, footwear, scarves describe how and why to wear regalia. A flow-chart shows ways to inform the school of an intention to wear regalia and what to do if that request is denied. A letter template lays out how students and their families can self-advocate.
Resources, including videos, are linked to support students, including the ACLU, the Native American Rights Fund and the Indian Law Resource Center.
“It’s kind of important”
Sunnyside High School graduate Yazmine Alvarez, who is Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham, chose to wear a stole last week. Although the stole is not designated regalia, it is worn by some students to represent where they come from.
At her graduation last week, Alvarez wore the light blue stole with the Pascua Yaqui logo on it over her royal blue Sunnyside gown. For Yazmine, the youngest of six kids in her family, the stole is a statement.
“I feel like it’s kind of important because not many Natives graduate because they tend to drop out,” she said, tapping her blue and clear nails with silver sparkles. “So it’s like, I get to show them, like I want to continue making my family proud and walk and then continue school.”
As one of six Sunnyside graduates in the Native American Education Program, Yazmine says she would like to become a phlebotomist or go into early childhood education.
High school graduation marks a big achievement for many Indigenous students, who have the lowest graduation rate of any racial or ethnic demographic both in Arizona and nationally.
Arizona’s four-year graduation rate for Indigenous students in 2024, the latest year data is available, was 68% and has hovered around that for the last seven years, according to the Center for the Future of Arizona. In Pima County, it was 75% in 2024.
The numbers reflect the cultural and societal worlds Indigenous students in urban areas straddle each day at their schools, says Kryc (pronounced Chris) Villegas, the Sunnyside High School Native American Education Program advisor.
Villegas, who is Yaqui, helps bridge those gaps as he supports about 150 students, keeping up with their academics, credit status and monitoring behavior and mental health issues.
On May 19, in the final week of school, nine students packed Villegas’ tiny office — some perched on backs of chairs, others standing, wearing dark hoodies — as red chile beef bubbled in a tiny slow cooker. The crunch of chips can be heard from the doorway.
“It’s a lot right now, just for the chance of an education,” he says. “That’s where we’re losing them. I get a lot of students that come off the reservation to a public school in the inner city. When they navigate, they got to navigate those two worlds where it’s a cultural world compared to the societal world.
“So, what I try to do because I live both those sides, I understand it,” he said. “It’s easier for me to relate to these students and say, ‘I know where you’re coming from.’ I lived that. And I also went to an inner-city school at the same time.”
For Daniel Gastelum, who leads Sunnyside Unified School District’s Native American Education Program, the toolkits lay out guidelines for students, families and administrators, but human connection is how it’s followed.
“What we find is essential and culturally significant, we support,” said Gastelum, who is also Yaqui. “We have not received a request that altered things to the point where we need to deny. We have a general understanding. We have a strict rule that caps and gowns cannot be altered.”
Rules and recommendations aside, Amira says just walking across the stage and earning her diploma is an example for her younger siblings and underclassmen. Her outfit — cap and gown with beaded earrings and moccasins on the outside and her ceremonial dress underneath — represents how she’s lived while earning her education.
“Some of the students growing up, they didn’t know what my culture was about,” she said. “It was just different for me with other people. They usually didn’t understand what I would talk about and I would have to explain it but they wouldn’t really get me or understand. So it would just make it hard.
“It’s just every time I try and wear cultural clothing and stuff like that, people just stare,” she said. “So I just try to assimilate.
“It makes me happy that I get to go on with life and school. I’ll just continue what I want to do at college. I want to become a pediatric nurse.”
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