Students to transform abandoned boarding school
Navajo Times | Krista Allen
The Navajo Mountain Boarding School Project team of eight students from the California College of the Arts walk through the old school campus, located near the senior center, on June 9 in Naatsis’áán, Utah.
NAATSIS’ÁÁN-RAINBOW CITY, Utah
Ryan Hueston says his late grandfather, a former Diné councilman who lived a life of service, would be proud of a renovation project he is spearheading here.
“It’s a really beautiful thing to hear my family say that my grandpa (Harold Drake Sr.) would be proud of this (project),” said Hueston, Diné-Anglo, whose family lives in Newport Beach, Calif. but calls Navajo Mountain home.
The Navajo Mountain Boarding School Project, Hueston’s team says, aims to empower the community’s creative potential through renovation and reinvention of Navajo Mountain Boarding School into a community center.
Hueston says his grandmother, Stella Rose Begay-Drake, 94, taught there and his mother, Mabelle Drake Hueston, along with her siblings, went to school there.
Ryan Hueston said the defunct boarding school buildings have been vacant since he was a child.
“I’ve always heard stories about them,” he said. “And they’ve always been architecturally fascinating to me.”
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Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow