Sheila Nadimi Photographs of Student Murals Inside Intermountain Intertribal Indian School

When Sheila Nadimi moved to Logan, UT from Canada in 1991, the surroundings looked mostly familiar. Mountains, trees, churches, houses. One feature of the landscape, however, did not.

“I saw those buildings, and they were not in my repertoire,” Nadimi remembers. “I'd never encountered architecture like that. They were also boarded up, so they were silent in a way.”

“Those buildings” were the 27 structures comprising what was first the Bushnell Military Hospital before it was converted into the Intermountain Indian School opened in 1950. Originally populated solely by Diné (Navajo) children, in 1974, Intermountain began welcoming students from across Indian Country, becoming known as the Intermountain Intertribal Indian School until closing in 1984. At its peak, Intermountain was the largest boarding school for Native Americans in the United States.

Anyone driving on Interstate 15 out of Salt Lake City the 60 north miles to Brigham City where the school was located would have surely noticed the massive site. Stern, austere, boxy, military-style buildings lined neatly in rows.

Nadimi did more than notice them. 

“I couldn't get them out of my mind,” she said. “I asked around, I thought, well, if I'm this fascinated, then there must be other people fascinated. I honestly just couldn't find anybody else that was that interested. (The buildings) were just there.”

In defense of everyone else not interested in the buildings, they are architecturally as drab as possible. All function, no fancy. Not to mention, they were deserted. Nothing was taking place there. That was part of their allure to Nadimi.

“I was attracted to the geometry, the repetition, and the severity of the order, and the fact that they were boarded up,” she said. “If it was an active place with windows open and people all around, I don't know that I would have been interested. It was so otherworldly, the scale of it, the silence of it, the fact that it didn't look like anything else around it. It looked like it just arrived and carved itself out onto the landscape.”

Nadimi’s husband at the time informed her the site was previously an Indian boarding school. Back then, she had no idea what that meant.

What was this place? How did it get there? Why was it abandoned?

Answers were hard to find, intrigue further fueling Nadimi’s interest.

“Now, I don't linger with mystery. I just go on the internet and find the answer,” Nadimi said. “(Then) I had to linger with my questions.”

She lingered for five full years, passing Intermountain on the interstate. Wondering.

“Finally, I just woke up one day and said, ‘I'm going over there,’” Nadimi remembers. “In that five years, I did develop what I felt was a relationship with (the buildings) from the outside. I always noticed them. I'd never gone on ground level, always from the highway.”

After that first up-close visit, Nadimi went back again and again. Again and again. Again and again over nearly 30 years, eventually producing a photography project in and around Intermountain she considers her life’s work.

Why the site captivated her so thoroughly, she still struggles to explain.

“There is something that I will never be able to fully understand. It felt like a gravitational pull, like a magnet, when you go by something and you don't even realize that it's pulling you,” Nadimi said. “That's how I see it now, I just got pulled to it, and in a way that I've never been pulled to anything in my life as far as infrastructure or architecture or built environment. The buildings presented a portal into other times, places, and ways of being. It was a different America than the one I was encountering outside the buildings.”

Photographing Intermountain

Initially satisfied walking the grounds and observing Intermountain from outside, Nadimi’s curiosity led her to wonder what was inside. Locked and boarded up, she found a custodian to let her take a peek.

“When the custodian opened the door and I saw these long, dark hallways, I felt it. I felt that there was something powerful in these buildings that needed to be documented,” Nadimi remembers. “I felt it was a complex, nuanced history that was way bigger than anything I could behold or comprehend. I felt dwarfed, not just by the architecture, but by these histories.”

She also felt compelled to make a record of what she saw.

With money just received following the death of a grandfather, she bought a camera. Nadimi had been an artist, but not a photographer.

“I needed something that was at the level of that history, not at my level,” she said. “I knew that the project needed photography, and that it needed a good camera, and I just had to learn how to use it.”

Camera at the ready, Nadimi contacted the New York development firm that owned the property at the time, receiving permission to go back inside and explore further for the purpose of developing a photography project related to the site. Thirty-eight of those images taken between 1996 and 2021 can be seen now through December 6, 2025, at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University in Logan, UT  during the exhibition “Eagle Village: Sheila Nadimi.” Intermountain’s mascot was the eagles. Nadimi’s exhibition pairs with another at the museum focused on 11 rescued and recently restored murals from Intermountain. 

“It was a labyrinth inside. It was pitch dark,” Nadimi remembers. “I had a whole different relationship to time and space inside. It required me to get into a certain frame of mind before going, I had to kind of psych myself up to go and spend a day out there. There was something about the darkness, the emptiness, these other worlds that this infrastructure contained inside, you really could have had no idea on the outside that this was all on these walls inside.”

What was on the walls that most fascinated her were artworks painted by former students.

“When I first encountered (a student) mural, I was weak in the knees,” Nadimi remembers. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ It was a very different mark making than the few things I saw in the school and the archival research I've done. Their (school) art projects were trying to please a teacher or get a grade; they had a slightly different look to them. This was for them alone.”

In Nadimi’s exploration of Intermountain’s male dorm rooms, she found the walls covered with artworks by students. Fantastic images of places and scenes and memories from home.

“It's art making and visual mark making outside of any expectation of the market, of parents, of teachers of the institution,” Nadimi explained. “It was what they decided to put on these walls for their purposes alone.”

How was she able to photograph in the dark?

“When I photographed something, I had to kick out the window,” Nadimi said. “The custodian, when I realized I can't photograph, obviously, without light, (and) you can't really use a flash in there, he said I could kick out that plywood window covering and let some natural light in. He would know where I had photographed and take a ladder and go up and re-nail it in. That's the only way that I could have gotten the images.”

Except for one.

The first of the student artworks Nadimi came across that wobbled her knees she photographed using light from a flashlight.

“It's the only one I've done this way, but I photographed it with the flashlight to mark that it was my first one. It's in the exhibition, and it's quite haunting,” Nadimi said. “It looks like a mask; it's a face done in orange with hollowed out eyes. It takes a five-minute to seven-minute exposure if it's just being lit by the flashlight, but that's what I did. I put it in the exhibition because I want the viewer to understand how I would have come across these murals.”

Sheila Nadimi Eagle Village Barracks Interior Asa Driftwood Mural photographed with Flashlight. Courtesy Sheila Nadimi.

Intermountain Indian School Murals

The Intermountain Intertribal Indian School differed from most Indian boarding schools in numerous ways. Most illustrative of the difference is boarding school students typically being referred to as “survivors.” Not the former students at Intermountain. They proudly consider themselves “alumni.” Alumni vs. survivor. That singular distinction reveals everything anyone would ever need to know about how different the student experience was at Intermountain compared to other Indian boarding schools.

Intermountain had a flourishing formal art department in addition to the private artworks students painted throughout the dorms. Allan Houser led the department for nearly 10 years at the school’s outset.

At its zenith, the entire campus would have felt like an art installation with paintings covering public and private spaces. Most were destroyed by time and vandals. Houser’s depiction in the gymnasium showing a Navajo desert landscape with horses and riders was too greatly degraded to be rescued when officials from Utah State University came across it.

In 2013, when USU purchased the land on which the former school sat, numerous murals were found detached and in deteriorated condition in a garage used for storing lawn equipment. No one knows who is responsible for saving them. More were lost than were saved, but someone tasked with clearing out the old buildings had enough sense and consideration to recognize them as something worth saving.

A guardian angel.

Since then, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art has partnered with Intermountain alumni, scholars, and tribal leaders to preserve—and now display—these remarkable artworks during the “Repainting the I” exhibition.

The murals are on display to the full public for the first time ever. Likewise with Nadimi’s photographs, most of which have never been seen publicly.