The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it will digitize 20,000 archival pages related to Quaker-operated Indian boarding schools.
“There are hundreds of schools that were operated historically with the sole aim to sever ties between child and family and between child and cultural heritage … so a lot of instances of abuse were administered to these children,” said Curley, a Navajo whose own family was affected by the boarding schools. The records, he said, will be crucial to confirming the anecdotal retelling of their harrowing experiences.
“This is a profound moment because as we have been calling on churches to increase the accessibility of these records for years now, it’s groups like these at these Quaker institutions who have responded to that call,” said Samuel Torres, deputy CEO of NABS, and a member of the Mexica-Nahua Indigenous people.
After the scanning, project leaders will hold an information session with tribal communities to discuss the findings. The project will include the production of a video with shared oral histories from boarding school survivors and their families. The digitized records will be made publicly available in spring 2024 on a database called the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, which NABS will launch later this year.
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