KVIG Informative

Nevada didn’t convert its last federal Indian boarding school into a museum because the state decided, on its own, to reckon with that history. A reversion clause written into the 1982 deed that handed Nevada the land did much of the deciding for it — and that same clause still governs the property today, nearly 140 years after the school was chartered.

The Nevada Legislature authorized the school in 1887, and it opened south of Carson City on Dec. 17, 1890, as the Stewart Institute, according to the property’s National Register of Historic Places nomination form. The name honored U.S. Sen. William Morris Stewart of Nevada, who secured the congressional funding that built it, according to the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office. By 1901 the school was operating under a different name, the Carson Industrial School, the nomination form states, before it eventually became known by the Stewart name it still carries.

The U.S. government ran the school to teach trades and assimilate American Indian children into mainstream culture, and attendance was mandatory for children from across the West through secondary-school age, according to the National Park Service. Native languages and customs were banned on campus, a policy the Park Service says caused lasting distress for students and their parents. Students initially came from the Great Basin tribes — the Washoe, Northern and Southern Paiute, and Western Shoshone — before the school began drawing children from tribal nations across the region, according to a history prepared for the Nevada Department of Public Works.

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Superintendent Frederick Snyder, who led the school from 1919 to 1934, started a building program that used colored native stone quarried along the Carson River, with student apprentices, including some from the Hopi Tribe, doing much of the stonemasonry themselves, according to the State Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service. Most of the campus’s surviving buildings date from that program, built between 1922 and the start of World War II. The finished complex grew to 83 buildings across a 109-acre campus, the Park Service’s records state.

The federal government operated the school continuously for 90 years before it closed in 1980, according to the National Park Service. The campus entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, listed under the reference number assigned to the Stewart Indian School Historic District.

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The United States conveyed the campus to the State of Nevada by quitclaim deed in 1982, according to a history prepared for the Nevada Department of Public Works. Provision 10 of that deed requires the state to keep Buildings 1 and 3 in use displaying crafts, artifacts and memorabilia from the school. If Nevada fails to meet that condition for as little as one year, the deed allows the Secretary of the Interior to declare a forfeiture, and the land reverts to the United States.

Nevada didn’t fully satisfy that condition until decades later. The Legislature appropriated more than $4.5 million across its 2017 and 2019 sessions, under Govs. Brian Sandoval and Steve Sisolak, to renovate Building 1 into the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center & Museum, which the Nevada Indian Commission opened to the public on Jan. 13, 2020, under founding director Bobbi Rahder. Its permanent exhibit, “Our Home, Our Relations,” tells the school’s history from former students’ own perspective, alongside a gallery for contemporary Great Basin Native art, a storytelling room and a research room for families searching for relatives who attended.

A deed clause meant to guarantee that Nevada couldn’t simply erase the school’s history did exactly what it was written to do: it forced the state’s hand, nearly 40 years after the campus stopped operating. Whether Nevada keeps complying indefinitely, and keeps federal ownership of the land off the table, is still an open question written into the property’s own paperwork, not a settled matter of the past.