The student body: a history of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-1940

In 1890, the State of Nevada built the Stewart Indian School on a parcel of land three miles south of Carson City, Nevada, and then sold the campus to the federal government. The Stewart Indian School operated as the only non-reservation Indian boarding school in Nevada until 1980 when the federal government closed the campus. Faced with the challenge of assimilating Native peoples into Anglo society after the conclusion of the Indian wars and the confinement of Indian nations on reservations, the federal government created boarding schools. Policymakers believed that in one generation they could completely eliminate Indian culture by removing children from their homes and educating them in boarding schools. The history of the Stewart Indian School from 1890 to 1940 is the story of a dynamic and changing institution. Only Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Western Shoshone students attended Stewart for the first decade, but over the next forty years, children from over sixty tribal groups enrolled at the school. They arrived from three dozen reservations and 335 different hometowns across the West. During this period, Stewart evolved from a repressive and exploitive institution, into a school that embodied the reform agenda of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. This dissertation uses archival and ethnographic material to explain how the federal government's agenda failed. Rather than destroying Native culture, Stewart students and Nevada's Indian communities used the skills taught at the school to their advantage and became tribal leaders during the 1930s. This dissertation explores the individual and collective bodies of Stewart students. The body is a social construction constantly being fashioned by the intersectional forces of race, class, and gender. Each chapter explores the different ways the Stewart Indian School and the federal government tried to transform the students' bodies through their physical appearance, the built environment, health education, vocational training, and extracurricular activities such as band and sports.