Stewart Indian School Enrollment: Changing Populations, Changing Dynamics

Stewart Indian School, Main Building, 1890

Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum Collection

The Stewart Indian School was initially opened to assimilate and “civilize” Native American children from Nevada. As time went on, however, the populations school officials targeted for enrollment expanded, and when the school closed in 1980, the majority of students came from out of state and represented numerous Indigenous nations.

When the Stewart Indian School opened on December 17, 1890, officials enrolled 37 children from the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe nations. This focus on Native Nevadan children continued for over a decade. The first major push to enroll students from out of state came in 1902, when Stewart School employees were permitted to collect Native children from central and northern California and southern Oregon who lacked nearby boarding schools in which to enroll. Though Native children from Nevada still comprised the majority of students at the school during this time, and would continue to be in the majority for at least four more decades, once school officials began enrolling children from out of state, they did not stop.

Stewart Indian School Students, Undated

Wikimedia Commons

Things at Stewart changed once again in the late 1920s after the publication of the Meriam Report, a federal investigation that documented the many shortcomings of the Indian educational system and chronicled the unhealthy conditions and overcrowding present at many off-reservation boarding schools. Because of this report, multiple schools were closed and thousands of Indigenous children enrolled in public schools for the first time, including in Nevada. This change, combined with a modification to the school’s admissions policy, once again altered the composition of the Stewart student body.

By 1933, the only students admitted to Stewart were children with no relatives to care for them, those who lived too far from or who were denied admission to a public school, those with supposedly unsuitable “home conditions,” and students who wished to attend a secondary school when none were located near their homes. The focus was no longer on enrolling the children of Native Nevadan nations at the Stewart Indian School, but rather specific groups of Native children identified by federal officials.

Female Stewart Indian School Students, 1940s

Wikimedia Commons

The student population changed dramatically at the end of the 1940s, when federal officials instituted the Navajo Special Program at eleven off-reservation boarding schools across the country, including at Stewart. As a means of advancing the termination of Indigenous treaty rights, the U.S. government, which viewed the Navajo Nation as unprepared for this process, developed an accelerated education plan for older Navajo children. Through the Navajo Special Program, students aged twelve to eighteen years were sent to off-reservation boarding schools for intensive instruction that would condense twelve years of education into just five. Between 1947 and 1959, nearly 4,000 Navajo students attended the Stewart School, and by the mid-1950s they significantly outnumbered all other groups of students attending the school.

During the school’s final two decades, in the 1960s and 1970s, Stewart transitioned into a vocational high school and student demographics changed once again. The last group of Navajo Program students attended Stewart during the 1958-1959 schoolyear. However, the end of the Navajo Program did not translate into the increased enrollment of Native students from Nevada. The school, per federal policy, again focused on enrolling students it characterized as living in unsuitable home conditions, and those who were orphaned, required special medical care, or who did not have access to secondary education near their homes. In 1963, for example, of the 625 students enrolled at the school, 100 came from Nevada, while the rest represented the Navajo (not in the Special Program), Pima, Apache, Hopi, Tohono O’odam, Havasupai, Mojave, Hualapai, Ute, and Goshute nations. This led the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada (ITCN) to advocate for an increase in the number of students from Nevada permitted to enroll at the school. Despite the ITCN’s efforts, during Stewart’s final school year, in 1979-1980, less than ten percent of graduating seniors were from Nevada.

Sources:

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

General Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75; National Archives and Records Building, Washington, D.C.

General Records of the Educational Division. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives - Pacific Region (San Francisco)

Nevada State Journal

Reno Evening Gazette.

Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum Collection

Hildegard Thompson. The Navajo’s Long Walk for Education: A History of Navajo Education.  Tsaile: Navajo Community College Press, 1975.