For Public Review: Stewart Indian Boarding School National Historic Landmark Nomination DRAFT (July 2026)

The NHL Program was pleased to partner with the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO) and their consultants at the OSIYO Group in completion of this draft NHL nomination for Stewart Indian School.

The draft nomination argues that Stewart Indian Boarding School (also known variously as Carson Indian School, Carson Indian Industrial School, Stewart Indian School, and Stewart Institute), located about three miles southeast of Carson City, Nevada, is nationally significant under National Historic Landmark Criterion 1 as outstandingly representative of broad national patterns in U.S. history regarding the development and operation of off-reservation boarding schools for the forced assimilation of Native children, and under Criterion 4 for the distinctive architecture and layout of its largely intact campus.

Stewart Indian Boarding School represents a non-reservation residential school campus representative of both the federal effort to culturally assimilate Native students forcibly removed from their families and Native resistance and persistence despite this generational trauma. Stewart also presents an uncommon case wherein the state acted to establish the school before turning it over to the federal government for operation. The proposed period of significance extends from 1890 to 1980, which spans the time that Stewart operated as an educational institution, and is reflective of the federal Indian policy of assimilation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

National Historic Landmarks (NHLs) are nationally significant historic places designated by the Secretary of the Interior as possessing exceptional value or quality in illustrating the history of the United States. As first authorized by the Historic Sites Act of 1935 and administered by the National Park Service, the NHL Program has overseen the designation of over 2,600 NHLs since 1960. NHL designation has been sought by private citizens or organizations; local, state, or Tribal governments; and federal agencies as the highest federal recognition of a propertys historic, architectural, or archeological significance.

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