HUNTINGTON PARK : A Rare Look Back at Indian Life

Melvin Ahhaitty sorted through piles of photographs, stopping occasionally and smiling when he came upon some of powwow season in Oklahoma, where he grew up.

“I miss the powwow season,” Ahhaitty said. “It was a chance for the different Plains Indians to get together at these gatherings.”

Ahhaitty, whose ancestry is Comanche and Kiowa, and wife Glenda, a Cherokee, gathered up their family photo albums and brought them to the Huntington Park Public Library for “Shades of L.A.,” an ongoing project in which volunteers are chronicling the county’s ethnic groups through photos.

The library began the American Indian project last October. It has conducted similar work with Latino, African- and Asian-American families, but the task of chronicling Indian life has been particularly daunting, said project coordinator Carolyn Kozo.

“American Indian photos are so rare,” Kozo said. “What is so special is that we have photos taken of American Indians by other Indians.”

Like others involved in the project, Glenda Ahhaitty, 53, said she was initially apprehensive about sharing her past.

“The Indian community is very private by nature, so we don’t share many of these things with each other, let alone with the public,” she said.

During a session this month at Huntington Park Library, volunteers made copies of about 500 photos, including several hundred from the Sherman Institute in Riverside. The institute provided photos of Indian children attending government boarding schools.

After the photos are catalogued, they will go on exhibit this fall in the Central Library. The Indian photo collection will then travel to the Huntington Park Indian Resource Center.

For Melvin Ahhaitty, 56, the photos were a reminder of his own experience at a government school in Oklahoma. “I was lonely much of the time I was in elementary school,” he said, recalling the day his parents took him to a government school.

Also among the photos to be included in the library’s collection are several from Karina Walters’ family. Walters, 29, said she recently discovered the photos her mother kept stored in a tin box.

“I just found these a few years ago,” said Walters, whose ancestry is Choctaw and Irish. “For me growing up, I was connected to the Indian urban community. So this (project) makes the history more understandable because in Los Angeles there is so much diversity.”