A coalition—the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS)—advocating for Native American people impacted by an oppressive system of boarding schools for Native youths, plans to digitize 20,000 archival pages related to schools in that system that were operated by the Quakers.
The Quakers and other faith groups—including Episcopalians, Methodists, and Catholics—have in recent years either begun or increased efforts to research and atone for their prior roles in the boarding school system that Native children were forced to attend and that cut them off from their families, tribes, and traditions.
The records will provide a better understanding of the conditions that children experienced at these schools, and help the compilation of statistics, including how many children went missing and died, said Stephen Curley, director of digital archives for NABS.
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.
“Those records can be really important for truth-telling processes and acknowledging and supporting the repair of past harms,” said Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, associate curator for Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.
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