Anyone who drives through Brigham City east towards Sardine Canyon will notice the giant letter “I” painted on the mountain. It stands for the Intermountain Indian School.
It opened in Brigham City in 1950 and was located in what used to be the Bushnell Army Hospital. The boarding school originally housed only Navajo students until it became the Intermountain Inter-Tribal Indian school in 1974, taking in students from nearly 100 tribes.
The school closed in 1984 and in 2013 the remaining buildings were demolished to make way for Utah State University’s Brigham City Campus.
Students in first through twelfth grades attended the school that was meant to assimilate them into the U.S. culture and society.
Around the school there were murals painted on the walls by students and a few by the art teachers, who encouraged creativity.
Before the buildings were torn down, a member of the Brigham City community cut some of the murals out of the walls, and they eventually ended up in the possession of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at USU.
Ronald Geronimo, a member of the Tohono O’odham Tribe, attended the school from 1978 to 1982.
“There were a lot of artists that were there," Geronimo said. "And that was encouraged as well, if you were an artist, to try to create, expand on that. So again, these were probably students painting their own culture, their own, you know, where they come from.”
Geronimo added that having these murals displayed and preserved brings back a lot of memories for the alumni and it also allows the memories at the school to live on.
The museum has possession of 11 murals. Katie Lee-Koven, the chief curator at the museum, is leading the conservation and presentation of the murals that were sent to a conservator in California.
“They are essentially restoring them," Lee-Koven said. "We're not trying to make them look like framed artworks. We want them to have a sense that these were formerly on a wall, you know, cut out of a wall but cleaned up so that you can look at the artwork and know where they came from.”
From grants and donations, the museum raised around $100,000 to pay for the conservation.
Along with the murals, there are also photos of the inside of the school, including the paintings on the walls, taken by artist Sheila Nadimi.
When Nadimi was studying at USU, she said she would often drive through Brigham City and was always intrigued by the Indian School buildings and eventually got inside.
Navigating with a flashlight, she discovered the murals one by one.
“And it was quite profound," Nadimi said, "because not only was it a trace of the previous inhabitants of that place, but it was a portal into a world that I knew nothing about. Indigenous relationships to land and culture, cosmologies, traditions, symbols, and this austere architecture that you could see from the outside — you'd have absolutely no idea that inside was an alternate America, another America that I knew very little about.”
Nadimi began documenting the buildings with her camera. She is working on a book titled "Eagle Village" which will feature her photos.
“It was myself as an artist that really was in those buildings — that I was trying to use art and photography to understand the complexity of this place, both architecturally and historically," Nadimi said.
Some of her photos will be a part of the exhibit at the museum.
Farina King, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, co-authored a book called "Returning Home" which features and contextualizes creative works of the Navajo students at the school. She has also been a part of the project to preserve and display the murals.
King said despite the bad intentions and purposes of the Native American boarding schools and the intergenerational trauma among families who were impacted by them, many of the alumni of Intermountain Indian School have positive memories and associations with the school.
“For some of them, it became another home to them," King said. "They did live there, they found their love there, you know, whatever, even with all the complexities and hardship of being separated from your family and homelands. So it's not the same as all the boarding school stories."
The exhibit at Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art is planned to begin in January of 2025.
