Native Americans on the Los Alamos Home Front: Dr. Floy Agnes Lee and the Tafoya Family

In 1942 the Manhattan Project took over the Los Alamos plateau, and the local Pueblo peoples, who had lived in the area since time immemorial, lost access to traditional lands and could no longer practice old traditions there. This National Park Service lesson on Los Alamos County, New Mexico, an American World War II Heritage City, looks at Native American contributions to the home front there.

Work, and discrimination

Native Americans worked at the Los Alamos laboratories — men mostly in construction, as truck drivers, carpenters and gardeners; women mostly as maids and in child care. Discrimination and distrust kept most out of skilled positions, with rare exceptions like Dr. Floy Agnes Lee.

An October 1945 wire story from the first press tour of Los Alamos — some 6,000 people living in a once-secret town 40 miles from Santa Fe — shows the attitudes of the time. It described a community with its own council, clubs, theater, choirs, orchestra and radio station, where the scientists counted as part of "the team" alongside the Indians who served soup in the cafeterias. It named Cleto Tafoya, former governor of Santa Clara Pueblo, working in a cafeteria, with his wife and daughter also employed there. A housing committee even rationed servants — mostly Native girls — by family size, which the reporter presented as democracy.

A cafeteria at Los Alamos, possibly the kind where Cleto Tafoya worked. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Department of Energy.

A soldier's memoir from Los Alamos recalls that the enlisted men were spared latrine and kitchen duty because local Mexican and Indian women were hired to do it.

Dr. Floy Agnes Lee

In an oral history interview (the Atomic Heritage Foundation's Voices of the Manhattan Project), Dr. Floy Agnes Lee told her story:

• Family: half Pueblo, half white — her father from Santa Clara Pueblo, a tailoring teacher; her mother a German-American teacher from Indiana. She grew up at the Albuquerque Indian School, where her parents worked.
• Education: biology at the University of New Mexico, where she helped with plant research and, for Professor Edward Castetter, researched what Native people ate in earlier times.
• Los Alamos, 1945: Los Alamos asked Castetter for a biology graduate for its hematology laboratory, and she went. Her job was to draw blood from the scientists building the bomb, and to read the blood cells.
• Fermi: scientists were known to her only by number. She played tennis with one — and beat him every time — until the soldiers in the lab told her, after the bomb was dropped, that he was Enrico Fermi. From then on she let him win, and they became very good friends.
• The accident: after a radiation accident, she took blood from Louis Slotin, who was fully exposed and died of radiation poisoning, and Al Graves, who stood partly shielded behind him. Graves's white cell count was so low that colleagues assumed she had erred; a second sample proved her right. Graves recovered, and they stayed friends for life.
• Being Pueblo: Los Alamos nearly didn't hire her because her father's family lived at Santa Clara; she was taken on only on condition that he could not visit. After the bomb was dropped, she finally brought him up, and the dormitories threw him a party. Returning after the war, she nearly wasn't hired again — the division head disliked minorities.
• Other Pueblo people worked there too: the chef was from Santa Clara, and her later technician, Pilar Aguilar, was the aunt of potter Maria Martinez.

Between her two stints at Los Alamos, Lee worked 22 years at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and earned her PhD at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Floy Agnes Lee, a biologist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Illustration: Department of Energy.

Pottery, and the Tafoya family

Los Alamos residents grew fascinated with Pueblo culture and pottery. Maria Montoya Martinez, respected in her community, impressed laboratory staff, and her pottery won worldwide recognition after the war. For Pueblo people, pottery has always stored food and water and served in celebrations and ceremonies; the clay is sacred, worked with prayer, thought and song. Demand from collectors — Los Alamos scientists among them — pushed production in ways that did not always fit tradition, but the interest also brought exchanges: square dances, holiday feasts. In December 1945, San Ildefonso Pueblo hosted about 200 Los Alamos scientists and their wives at a dance with Maria Martinez, painter Louis Gonzalez and Governor Donicio Sanchez; Maria's son, T/5 Popovi Martinez, stationed at Los Alamos, was master of ceremonies in Tewa and English, and guests included Enrico Fermi.

Potter Maria Montoya Martinez with Enrico Fermi. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Department of Energy.

Few accounts come from Native people near Los Alamos; most come from scientists and their families, which skews the record. The Tafoya family of Santa Clara helps fill it in:

• Cleto Tafoya was a Santa Clara leader: when four factions came together in 1935 to write the Santa Clara Pueblo Constitution — the basis of a new council for working through political differences — he served on the constitutional committee and signed the final copy as secretary. How and when he came to work in a Los Alamos cafeteria is unknown.
• His wife, Severa Gutierrez Tafoya, was a potter; some of her undated pieces may come from the years he worked at Los Alamos.
• Their daughters Mary Agnes Tafoya and Angela Tafoya Baca became well-known potters. Angela specialized in melon pots, now in many museums and galleries, and four of her children carry on the form. Her husband, Jose Baca, served in World War II as an Army private first class; his Zia Company supported services at the Los Alamos laboratories.

More in the NPS Los Alamos County WWII Heritage City lessons and Teaching with Historic Places.

Sources

Based on Sarah Nestor Lane, "(H)our History Lesson: Native American Home Front Contributions in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, WWII Heritage City," National Park Service, written under the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the NPS; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. It draws on Dr. Lee's interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Harold Heroux's International News Service report (Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, October 3, 1945), The Santa Fe New Mexican (December 7, 1945) and Benjamin Bederson's memoir, all summarized rather than reproduced. The lesson's questions and activities are left out, as are the gallery photographs credited to other archives, a museum and a Wikipedia contributor: Severa Tafoya in 1935, Cleto Tafoya, and pots by Severa Tafoya and Angela Tafoya Baca. The source's "Flay" is corrected to Floy.