Boyhood memories helped to inspire Ryan Hueston.

He grew up hearing stories about the old boarding school on Navajo Mountain (Naatsis’aan), which was established in the late 1920s.

More than 70,000 Navajo students passed through its doors.

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.

This project – the first phase is funded through a $10,000 grant – will also include artist residencies, opportunities for public engagement, and documentation of the entire undertaking. The initial phase is expected to be ready in July with future plans depending on receiving other grants.

By providing a platform, this project will serve as a catalyst for the continued creation of arts education and cultural programs in the hands of the community.

However, it proposes more than a specific solution to a local problem. The aim is to devise a model for community oriented attempts, one that brings people from outside to work in a dialogue, responsive to the creative potential of the community, nourishing it rather than dictating resolutions. Like the architecture of the buildings themselves, it’s a dialogue of cultures.

“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,

Hueston’s parents are Mabelle Drake Hueston and John Hueston, one of the prosecutors in the Enron trial.

The Navajo Mountain Boarding School Project, Hueston’s team members say, aims to empower the community’s creative potential through renovation and reinvention of Navajo Mountain Boarding School into a community center.

The boarding school was closed in the early 1990s.

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.

To begin, the program brought together the Navajo Mountain Community in a ceremony that was part renovation, part communal dialogue, part art and cultural celebration.

The project in its entirety will be documented on a website. This archive will enable the easy passing of knowledge gained, professional documentation of the unique architectural reconstruction, and further self-expression for and promotion of the community. Furthermore, by making the organization and structure of the project visible, the website will facilitate use of the project as a model for community-oriented work world-wide.

The restoration process will include daily communal meals, storytelling, cultural workshops, and indigenous-arts workshops. The state-of-the-art restoration will proceed in a careful and respectful manner, building on existing relationships and exchange between the community and the team.

The community will contribute to the restoration of the mud roof, cleaning, and painting, as well as the communal creation of meals, music, art and stories. Already, the project has over a hundred volunteers from the community who are ready to put in the time and effort to give these buildings a new life.

“I’ve always heard stories about them,” he said. “And they’ve always been architecturally fascinating to me.”

Current community proposals include:

● A language and culture center.

● A historical museum and archive.

● An indigenous arts camp.

● An educational visitors center and hostel.

With renovations and reopening, the boarding school buildings will become a functional part of the Navajo Mountain Chapter House complex, to which they are adjacent, contributing classrooms, an auditorium and a cafeteria.

The full proposal was submitted to California College of the Arts for the 2016 IMPACT Grant.