Nevada bill brings Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum to the brink of reality
Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn appointed Sherry Rupert to be executive director of the Nevada Indian Commission in September of 2005. Not too many years after Rupert’s appointment, plans began forming to develop a cultural center and museum on the campus of the Stewart Indian School, just a few miles south of Carson City, and AB44 is a part of the ongoing effort to bring that vision to reality.
The Stewart Indian School operated from 1890 to 1980 and was one of as many as 60 Indian boarding schools located throughout the nation. Schools where students were involuntarily gathered from local tribes and forced to adopt western, Christian culture. The Stewart school and others like it were tools of cultural assimilation. The first of these off-reservation boarding schools was launched in 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where the motto was, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
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