KVIG Informative

Nevada lawmakers created the Nevada Indian Commission in 1965 to give the state’s tribes a formal channel to the governor’s office — a five-member panel with no independent authority beyond studying issues and reporting recommendations. Fifty-nine years later, the Nevada Legislature elevated that same commission into a cabinet-level department that also runs a former federal Indian boarding school turned public museum and, as of this year, a council giving tribal health directors an actual vote in state health policy.

The Nevada Legislature created the Nevada Indian Commission in 1965 under what is now Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 233A, establishing a five-member body appointed by the governor: three members who are American Indian and two members representing the general public, according to the statute’s text as published by the Legislature. The Nevada Department of Native American Affairs’ own account of the commission’s founding describes its original purpose as opening a formal channel for tribal governments to raise concerns directly with the governor’s office.

Under the statute, the commission can appoint advisory committees and negotiate and contract with other government agencies to study issues affecting American Indian welfare, and it must compile and report its findings and recommendations at least once every two years, according to NRS 233A.

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Decades before the commission existed, the federal government had already built the institution the state would later fold into the same agency. The Bureau of Indian Affairs opened Stewart Indian School in Carson City in 1890 to educate children from Nevada’s Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone tribes, according to the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum’s own history. The boarding school went on to enroll children from more than 200 tribes across the western United States before federal operations ended in 1980, the museum says.

The State of Nevada spent $4.5 million renovating the school’s 1923 administration building and 1925 post office to create the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, which held its official opening in January 2020 and a grand opening on June 18, 2022, according to the museum’s own account. The museum operates in partnership with the Great Basin Native Artists Collective and remains free and open to the public.

The Nevada Legislature restructured the commission in 2023, elevating it into its own executive branch entity, the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs, with the change taking effect July 1, 2024, according to the department’s own announcement. The new department absorbed both the Nevada Indian Commission and the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum under one roof, according to NRS 233A.

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The Legislature added a third body to the department in 2025: the Tribal Health Authority Council, which seats directors of tribal health care facilities as voting members alongside nonvoting state agency liaisons, according to NRS 233A.

A commission that started in 1965 with the power to study problems and issue reports every two years now oversees a former assimilation-era boarding school run as a public museum and, as of this year, a council where tribal health directors carry an actual vote in state policy — a state relationship with Nevada’s tribes that has moved, over six decades, from advisory to institutional.