Intermountain Indian School student Lydia Rose Betoni (standing) and her younger sister at home in Navajoland.

The Navajo, or Diné, Nation has its traditional homeland in the Four Corners region between Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Its current reservation is the largest in the United States. This beautiful but challenging landscape shaped Navajo history, including the nation’s need for boarding schools.

The original Navajo homelands are larger than the current reservation, but after Navajo conflicts with non-Native settlers, the government forced the Navajo off their lands during the Long Walk of 1864, where hundreds of Navajos died. The government wanted to move the tribe to Oklahoma, but the Navajo resisted leaving behind their homeland. In 1868, the Navajo signed a treaty with the government allowing them to return to a much-reduced homeland.

Part of that treaty was an agreement that the Navajo would send their children to government-run schools. These schools hoped to turn Navajo children away from their traditional lifestyle and into mainstream American culture. The presence of valuable coal, oil, and uranium on the reservation further threatened Navajo independence as outside industries sought to control those valuable resources.

A family on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

During World War II, about 400 Navajo men served as code talkers for the U.S. Marines. Because Navajo is difficult for non-native speakers to learn and very different from most other languages, Navajos could speak to each other about sensitive information like troop movements and positions without fear of enemy forces decoding their messages. They performed life-saving work during the war but returned home to find their nation still underserved by the government. Their children, in many cases, did not have nearby schools they could attend. Some of the Navajo children were close enough to cities to go to public schools, but there they were often treated like second-class citizens.

Intermountain Indian School opened in 1950 in the buildings of the former Bushnell General Military Hospital as a boarding school to address the government’s shortcomings in providing schooling on the Navajo reservation. Indian boarding schools had a long, negative history. They took children far from their homes and families, but there were no less expensive options for providing educational facilities for so many children.