A New Online Tool Will Let Native Americans Search for Relatives Who Attended Indian Boarding Schools

The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) plans to launch a website this summer that will allow Native Americans to search for information on relatives who attended Indian boarding schools. 

The digital archive repository and research tool will launch with nearly 50,000 records from a federal archive and, over time, integrate records from other Indian boarding school databases developed by private, nonprofit and governmental organizations.   

“I hope that we find relatives that you're searching for,” NABS CEO Deb Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington, said last week. “Even if they’re on the other side, I know that they want to be found.”

Parker was speaking to about a group of two dozen American Indians, Alaska Natives and a few journalists who gathered at the Tulalip Indian Reservation’s administrative building on April 24 to learn how to use the research tool. 

NABS staff invited the participants, including Native News Online, to a sharing-and-listening session on the heels of the Department of the Interior’s sixth stop on its Road to Healing tour at Tulalip the day prior. The Road to Healing is a year-long tour across the United States to provide Native survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system and their descendants an opportunity to share their experiences. 

Last year, the federal government released an investigative report that showed for the first time the United States operated or supported at least 408 boarding schools that “directly targeted American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation that coincided with Indian territorial dispossession.” The report called the institutions “both traumatic and violent” and identified at least 53 burial sites on or near former schools’ properties, with more gravesite discoveries expected as research continues.

Although the names of the institutions themselves are known or becoming known, the identities of the estimated tens of thousands of Native children who went through the Indian boarding school system—many of whom died at schools far from home and were never returned to their families—are not.

Student and school records are held in repositories across the country, which are oftentimes far removed from Native communities and available only for in-person viewing, or altogether closed to the public.

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