Utah’s Intermountain Indian School is gone, but the Native students’ artwork lives on. Here’s where to see it.

Logan • When Canadian artist Sheila Nadimi first happened upon the abandoned buildings of the former Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, she felt a gravitational, even emotional, tug toward them.

“It was a vast array of monotonous buildings,” said Nadimi, who lived in Logan in the early ‘90s. “My relationship with the buildings started immediately, really, from my first time seeing them.”

Brigham City and Logan were the first places Nadimi learned to love in the United States. She often would drive past the school buildings on her way home through Sardine Canyon, each time growing more curious about them. One day, she decided to get a closer look, and a groundskeeper let her inside.

From that point forward, her curiosity spurred a conviction to document the buildings. The former school, which had previously been the Bushnell General Military Hospital, was adorned with paintings and writings created by the students who once lived there.

“I just felt like this is something way bigger than me,” Nadimi said, “bigger than anything I’d ever known.”

So, in 1996, she began a project to photograph the buildings and the land they occupied. She didn’t know then that she would be taking pictures of the school for the next 25 years, spending hundreds of hours wandering through the pitch-dark hallways and spaces inhabited by Native American children from across the country — spaces decorated with their artwork and murals.

This month, her photo archive, titled “Eagle Village,” will be publicly available for the first time at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. The archive will be displayed the rest of the year in conjunction with the museum’s new exhibit, “Repainting the I: The Intermountain Intertribal Indian School Murals.”

“Once you’re in those buildings, I lost sense of time and place because of the darkness,” Nadimi said. “These murals revealed places and people I had no direct experience with. It was otherworldly to be in those buildings.”

Tearing down the buildings

The Intermountain Indian School was open to Native American students between 1950 and 1984.

Utah’s earlier Native American boarding schools, in the Uinta Basin and around the state, deliberately and sometimes forcibly cut off Indigenous children from their families and culture. Students were required to use English, to provide free labor, and were sometimes hungry, poorly dressed or abused.

Intermountain has a more mixed legacy. Its model still separated kids from their homes, but it did not approach assimilation as harshly. Students could practice their culture, including creating art that celebrated their traditions.

There were complaints and investigations about conditions at the school at times. But students also fought to keep it open when Bureau of Indian Affairs officials started to discuss closure, and alumni still meet for reunions.

In the early 2000s, Nadimi began to see the remaining buildings deteriorate as they fell victim to vandals and ghost hunters. Eventually, they became too hazardous to photograph from the inside, so she shifted her focus to the surrounding landscape. Shortly afterward, in 2013, the buildings were demolished.

In 2021, Nadimi took her final picture — one of the “I” on Brigham City’s hillside with new housing developments beneath it — bringing an end to the archive.

“I felt that the land stopped being something else,” she said. “It started being something that you would expect to see on the landscape.”

A full museum exhibition, available between Jan. 24 and Dec. 6, will examine the artistic legacy of the school. Along with 38 of Nadimi’s photos, the gallery will include 11 recently restored murals from the school’s dormitories that haven’t been on display since the campus was razed. The final part of the exhibition is the repainting of the “I” in Brigham City.

Katie Lee-Koven, the museum’s chief curator, said Utah State has access to murals that once adorned the school, thanks to a community member who cut them out of the walls. She said that effort, with the help of community donors and the Fine Art Conservation Laboratories, led to the conservation of the wall art.

“It’s hard to imagine when you’re in this space,” Lee-Koven said, looking at the soon-to-open exhibit, “but you can imagine how pervasive art was at Intermountain.”

Renewing memories

Ronald Geronimo, who attended the school from 1978 to 1982, attests to this culture of creativity.

When Geronimo arrived in Brigham City as a 15-year-old after a long journey from southern Arizona, he said the walls were full of landscapes reflecting the homes of his Navajo classmates. The school served only Navajo students during its first 20 years of operation.

Geronimo, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, became involved in Nadimi’s photo project due to his curiosity about what had happened to the school. Through the years, he has shared his experiences at the school with the artist.

Students often painted and drew what they knew before attending Intermountain, Geronimo said. Working on this project has revived his memories, something he hopes the exhibit will do for other former students.

“A lot of what we have now are memories,” he said, “and those help to renew our memories, those paintings and seeing them. It just reminds me of the time when we were there and the things that we did.”

An annual hike and repainting of the hillside “I” above the former school is another effort to ensure these memories live on, he said. As a teen, he remembers playing on that hill with his friends.

“A lot of alumni describe Intermountain as our home away from home,” Geronimo said. “So when you see the ‘I’ on the mountain, you know you’re home again. You’re going to see your friends, you’re going to have that kind of freedom.”

Scholar Farina King, a mural committee member for the exhibit and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, said this shows the importance of memorialization. She said she hopes the display will serve as a window into Indigenous experiences that, over and over again, various forces try to erase or cover up.

The artwork sheds light on people who have overcome many hardships, King said, something empowering to her as a descendant of boarding school survivors.

“This is a testament of what has happened here,” King said. “This is a testament of people’s lives who so often are made invisible. This is the work of the heart.”

— Tribune reporter Courtney Tanner contributed to this report.