Repainting the I: The Intermountain Intertribal Indian School Murals

In 1950, the Intermountain Indian School (1950-1984) in Brigham City, Utah, opened as a federally funded residential boarding school for school-aged children from the Navajo Nation. In 1974, it admitted youth from any Native American tribe. From 1974 until it closed in 1984, school children from as many as one hundred Native Nations were represented. It subsequently added “Intertribal” to its name.

Both during and since its closure in 1984, students who attended Intermountain have gathered to repaint the “I,” symbolic of “Intermountain,” on the side of the mountain overlooking the former campus and Brigham City, Utah. The enormous painted “I” ensures that the school and the thousands of Native American youth who attended the school are not forgotten.

Intermountain was one of the 523 Native American boarding schools that dotted the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nationally renowned Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser taught art at Intermountain for almost a decade. Houser and some other faculty and staff at Intermountain embraced the arts and encouraged students’ creative self-expression. Art with Indigenous themes was prominently displayed across campus, adorning hallways and dorm rooms. These vibrant artworks were not the product of professional artists but the students themselves. Given paint and permission from their teachers, these young individuals created images that connected them with home. Through their creativity and perseverance, students found ways to assert their cultural heritage and navigate the constraints of an assimilationist system.

Repainting the I features eleven murals that once adorned the walls of Intermountain, following their four-year restoration. In 2013, when Utah State University purchased the land on which the former school sat, these murals were found in a garage. Someone in the community had removed and saved a small selection of the artworks before the buildings were torn down. The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art has worked with Intermountain alumni, scholars, and tribal leaders to preserve these works of art. This is the first time these restored murals are available for the public to view.

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