Visiting the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum

On Monday, I had the opportunity to go to Carson City and see the newly opened Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum. This was my first opportunity to see the fully-renovated building and the exhibits I had the opportunity to work on, and I was completely blown away. The museum tells the whole story of the school – including some very dark moments – while also focusing on the resilience of Stewart students and their families and their lives after leaving the school. I hope these photos will encourage you to travel to Carson City and see it for yourself. It is a beautiful, emotional, and inspiring site, and the museum team – Bobbi Rahder and Chris Ann Gibbons – have done an incredible job.

Upon entering the building, visitors learn that the Stewart Indian School was built upon the homelands of the Great Basin Indigenous tribes, and they have the opportunity to view welcome messages in the Northern and Southern Paiute, Western Shoshone, and Washoe languages.

In addition to the main exhibit space, the facility includes a storytelling room, a research room, and an art gallery that displays works by Indigenous Great Basin artists. This latter room is called the Wa-Pai-Shone Gallery, and is named after a series of trading posts established the 1930s in which Stewart students and Great Basin artists sold their work.

It was important for Museum Director Bobbi Rahder and Curator Chris Gibbons to place the founding of the Stewart Indian School within the broader historical context of the European invasion of the Americas. This means explicitly referencing the genocide against Native peoples, policies geared toward their erasure, and the trauma this history has engendered within tribal nations.

Each section in the museum has a theme designed to tell visitors about various aspects of students’ lives. Student voices and quotes inform visitors what alumni experienced in a typical day, the challenges they navigated, and how they worked to make Stewart feel like a second home. Visitors also get a sense of how Stewart changed over the years, how students and families resisted some school policies, and what happened when the school closed in 1980.