Native American children were kidnapped from their families and packed into wagons, trucks and trains to be taken off their reservation. At the Stewart Indian School, their hair was cut, they were forced to wear military-style uniforms and relinquish their cultural heritage, and they were punished for speaking their native language.
Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum
• Where: 1 Jacobsen Way, Carson City
• Phone number: 775-687-7606.
• Hours of operation: Monday-Friday Museum, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
• Grand reopening: May 9.
The 240-acre boarding school in Northern Nevada was large and unfamiliar; the dorms cold and sterile. As one Western Shoshone tribe member described it, “We lost communication with our families at home. Half of them didn’t expect us to come home anyway.”
That story’s just one of hundreds being told at the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, which opened in December a few miles southeast of Carson City.
Founded in 1890, the school was operated by the federal government for 90 years as part of an assimilation effort to erase indigenous culture. These “Americanization” policies stemmed from the mindset that Native people who adopted western customs and values would have an easier time fitting in with the rest of society. By 1919, the school’s enrollment stood at 400 students.
“We really worked hard to make it an educational exhibit,” museum director Bobbi Rahder says. “We want people to know that what happened at these boarding schools was a cruel federal policy that still affects families. We also wanted to show that everyone had a different experience. Some good, some bad.”
The effort to transform the school into the museum has been years in the making, says Stacey Montooth, executive director of the Nevada Indian Commission. After the government shuttered the school in 1980, the state took over the property, housing state agencies on the 110-acre campus. During the 2019 legislative session, lawmakers allocated $4.5 million to restore the buildings and create the museum and welcome center.
SIS main school building with students
Montooth, who took the helm of the commission in early September, says the heavy lifting was done long before she came onboard, and credits work in preserving the site and rallying for state funding to her predecessor, Sherry Rupert.
“This really was a huge undertaking for her,” Montooth says. “She did everything from working with engineers to the people who did the art installations. It’s been an idea for at least a decade.”
The exhibits
Museum visitors will encounter a storytelling exhibit featuring the four main Native language groups spoken by 27 federally recognized tribes, bands and colonies in Nevada—Wa She Shu (Washoe); Numu (Northern Paiute); Nuwu or Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute); and Newe (Western Shoshones). The display includes a class photo and art by students from the time. Museum organizers collected hundreds of oral history interviews to tell stories from the school’s 90-year history.
A research room will showcase the work of Superintendent Frederick Snyder, who tried to beautify the Stewart campus in the 1920s with landscaping done by students and stone structures built by Hopi stonemasons. Also, the Wa-Pai-Shone Gallery—named after the Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone tribes—features artwork from the Great Basin Native Artists.
“We have all kinds of art done by former students and even family members of alumni that represent the experience at Stewart,” Montooth says. “We believe the uniqueness of the Stewart Indian School is having these firsthand accounts from the people.”
The museum also offers an “Our Home, Our Relations” exhibit, documenting the school’s evolution from federal assimilation to establishing the campus as an off-reservation boarding school.
Healing from intergenerational trauma
Montooth says the negative ramifications of Indian boarding schools are still being felt, as descendants of past alumni carry on the trauma their parents and grandparents had to endure.
In the oral histories collected by museum organizers, former students described instances of losing all contact with their families, having their heads shaved after being bathed in kerosene and even enduring beatings simply for speaking their native languages.
In one story retold by Washoe tribe member Herman Fillmore, an elder was at his mother’s deathbed. He asked her in tears of anger, “Why didn’t you teach me the language and culture? She simply replied, ‘Because if you didn’t know it, they couldn’t beat it out of you.’ ”
Montooth says such experiences have contributed to distrust of the American education system by Native families. “Even today, the expectation and value they put on public education is not what it would be had it not been for the boarding school era,” she says. “It’s completely disheartening.”
Montooth says she hopes confronting trauma in the exhibit will be the first step in a healing process for generations to come. “I wish I had money for every time my grandmother told me, ‘They can cut your hair, they can take our land, they can take our language, but they can’t take our mind,’ ” she says.
‘A second home’
While Stewart Indian School represented a prison for some, it was seen as a refuge and “second home” for others. That was the case for Ron Lewis, who graduated in 1978. A member of the Gila Indian Reservation in Arizona, Lewis says he remembers begging his mother to let him attend Stewart when he reached high school age.
At the time, Stewart had already undergone the changes that followed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which permitted Native self-determination and self-government. By the 1960s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged schools like Stewart to allow students speak their native languages and emphasize liberal arts courses over the vocational training that had been mainly taught in the past.
For Lewis, the prospect of leaving his home on the reservation to attend school in Nevada was exciting. “I just wanted to get away from home,” he says. “When I arrived there, I didn’t realize there were other tribes than the one I knew. It was interesting to me. I enjoyed being there and never got homesick.”
Lewis, 60, still gets emotional when he thinks about the bonds he formed and friends he made as a member of the football, baseball and boxing teams. He says he still talks to his roommate, whom he met on his first day of school. Another friend he made at school is now his boss at Gila River Sand & Gravel in Pinal County, Arizona.
“When I left, I was pretty sad,” he says. “To this day, there are times when I start talking to someone about my school days, and it starts choking me up. I’m really proud of the school.”