High School Level
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Dr. Marigold Linton – Cognitive Psychologist
I am Cahuilla-Cupeno, and a great-great granddaughter of Antonio Garra,
war chief of the Cupeno who led an insurrection against the invaders. I was
born and raised on the Morongo Reservation in Southern California, and the
texture of those years permeate my life in many ways. We lived in a small
adobe house that my parents built. Our water came from a cistern and
periodic irrigation. We used kerosene in our lamps and spent our weekends
gathering the wood to burn in our stove. We had a battery-operated radio
and could only afford to listen to one or two programs a week. I thought the
rich people were the ones with indoor toilets and electricity.
Very early in life I began to have vivid dreams, some of which were
powerful enough to be called visions. These dreams talked to me about
leaving the reservation, something of which I was very fearful. But they also spoke of coming back. The
visions told me that if I did leave I would become "someone." I remember those dreams/visions almost as
vividly today as when they occurred.
I did very well in school. My mother often said to me, “You are lucky, the school fits your mind. Your
brothers are smart, too, but the school does not fit their minds.” One of the deciding points in my life was
having my eighth grade teacher come onto the reservation to see my mother. “Your daughter is very smart
and should go to college,” she said. This idea fit with my dreams; so that day I started saving my money to
go to college. I also played tennis in high school, and I was good enough to win the county championship
in both singles and doubles. The college I chose was the University of California, Riverside
(www.ucr.edu). It was thirty miles and a world away from the reservation.
Although Riverside was then a small and friendly town, I found it terrifying and I was the only Indian at
the University. I struggled to do things the way the white folks did. I still had no clear idea what college
was, but I could tell that I needed good grades if I was to stay and continue my quest to become
“someone.” I committed myself to working fourteen to sixteen hours a day on my classes. I spent my
savings frugally, living on a monotonous diet and affording no pleasures. I lived in dread of failing. When
I finally received my grades at the end of the first semester, to my disbelief I found I had straight A’s.
I changed majors a number of times, finally settling on psychology. I avoided classes like chemistry,
biology and calculus because my biologist friends had assured me I wouldn’t do well in those “real”
classes. However, when I was a senior I discovered I would need these classes for graduate school, so I
took biology, calculus and a course on evolution. I loved them and did very well; but by then I was an
experimental psychologist. I had started doing research as an undergraduate and had two publications by
the time I entered graduate school, which was very unusual for the time. I did graduate work at the
University of Iowa (www.uiowa.edu) and obtained my Ph.D. from the University of California, Los
Angeles (www.ucla.edu).
I was trained as an experimental psychologist and eventually became what is called a cognitive
psychologist. This discipline is concerned with how people think, learn, perceive (see, hear, feel), and
remember. My specialty is very long-term memory. My research relates to questions such as how long
learned-information is retained, and if it is retained longer if you study more. Though they sound like easy
questions, the answers are complex.
Copyright © 2002 SACNAS
www.sacnas.org
Dr. Marigold Linton – Cognitive Psychologist
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I wanted to teach at a university and do research, but at the time I obtained my degree most university
positions were closed to women. I spent ten years at San Diego State University (www.sdsu.edu) and
became a full professor. I was hired at the University of Utah (www.utah.edu), the first woman to be hired
as a full professor. However, I never forgot those visions of returning to my people. During the day I
taught psychology classes and did research. The rest of the time I was involved in the national Indian
education movement of the 60s and 70s. I served on the founding board of the National Indian Education
Association (www.niea.org). Guided by the only powerful vision I have had since leaving the reservation,
in 1986 I moved to Arizona State University (www.asu.edu), where I could work more closely with the
tribes. I ran a coalition mandated to improve mathematics and science education for twenty tribes in
Arizona. Recently I have moved to the University of Kansas (www.ukans.edu) where I work closely with
Haskell Indian Nations University (www.haskell.edu ) and the Haskell Health Center (www.ihs.gov) to
provide science research opportunities for Haskell students in the laboratories of research scientists at the
University of Kansas.
Copyright © 2002 SACNAS
www.sacnas.org