Federal funding cuts jeopardize access to Indian Boarding School history

(NATIONAL) The Indian Boarding School Era lasted over a century. It was a time of forced assimilation of Native American children and the attempted erasure of Native American culture, often at the protest of their families and communities. Thousands of children are believed to have died during the process. But while the most traumatic of the abuse is in the past, the impacts of those abuses continue to live on in Native American families across the U.S. 

Fallon Carey (Cherokee) is the Digital Archives Manager of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). After growing up in Oklahoma, just outside of Tahlequah, she now lives in Minneapolis, where NABS is headquartered. 

“Part of the mission of NABS and the digital archives team is by providing access to this information, we're hoping that we can take back our own histories,” Carey said. 

Over the last few years, navigating that history and helping others do the same has become an even more personal mission for Carey, who learned more about her own family history through her work at NABS. 

“I learned this because I went and got a degree and that is something I'm very privileged to have, but I also know these things through working with NABS,” Carey said. “I had no idea, for example, that I had a great grandmother who went to Chilocco in Oklahoma until I started doing this work. And so, some folks may not even know that their own family records are sitting in the National Archives warehouse somewhere, but we can help build the bridge to help people get access to those.”

According to the Department of the Interior’s Federal Boarding School Initiative, Chilocco was one of Oklahoma’s 87 Indian boarding schools, the most populous state for Indian boarding schools by far.  

But, Carey and her team’s work of helping others understand this expansive history hit a significant roadblock last month, when they received notice that their federal funding was terminated.

“It happened, oh gosh, on a late Wednesday, well after five o'clock,” Carey said. “Even for DC, it was pretty late. In the middle of the night. We got a very impersonal email, basically saying that our organization's mission is not in alignment with what the Trump administration deems worthy of funding from NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities). And so effective immediately, our funding was terminated.” 

The letter, which Carey shared with VNN Oklahoma, stated: “The President’s February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” 

Carey said her department was in the second year of the grant. The loss of funds was approximately $283,000 and they have had two lay off two part-time catalogers and pause contracts with two sub-awardees they were working with as a result. 

She said NABS expected the termination, but it didn’t soften the painful blow very much.

“When the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) stuff started to happen, I had talked to somebody in the archives community who indicated to me that they have heard whisperings of potential shutdowns and access to documents being changed and so we decided that we were going to hit it really hard earlier this year,” Carey said. “Myself and a couple of other NABS employees spent all basically January until March and some in April, in and out of the National Archives. Just to make sure that we got the records.”

Carey told us they were able to digitize about 80,000 pages of boarding school records from five different repositories, but with their funding being terminated those documents are just sitting in limbo. 

“There's a lot of cataloging and processing that needs to happen before it can be ingested and made publicly available,” Carey said. “Until we get new funding we can't do that work.” 

Following the termination, the NABS Digital Archives team will also no longer be able to put on their daylong workshop at the International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums this October, a crucial process for improving policies relating to their National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA). 

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM), who hosts the conference, recently put out a call to action, urging people to take action to help restore funding to the NEH and Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Carey said digitizing historical documents is only part of the work their team does; equally important is helping people, particularly elders, find the answers they are looking for in all of it, without having to travel across the country or pay money for hundreds of copies that might not even be relevant to what they need.

“Not only do we put the records online that we digitize, but we're also available for people to reach out to us if they need help with the archives,” Carey said. “And so we have elders all the time and survivors and descendants who are like, hey, my great grandmother went to Pipestone Boarding School. Do you know where I could find those records? Yes.” 

When asked why these Indian boarding school records are so important today, Carey offered the generational wisdom of her friend Benjamin Jacuk (Dolchok), who works at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. 

“His grandfather is a boarding school survivor up in Alaska, and his grandfather described it to him this way,” Carey said. “He said, when you're running down the street and you fall and you scrape up your knee really badly. In order for that wound to heal, you have to address it. You have to clean it out. You need to address the fact that you have an open wound, and until you do that, you're not going to heal properly.”  

“I see all the issues that are known to stem from boarding school issues,” Carey said. “Health issues, diabetes, heart disease, lack of access to nutritious foods. Substance abuse disorders, varying kinds of abuse in Native households, the breakdown in the structure of our families, and a lot of these issues are in my own family. And so when I actually was able to see, oh, this is something that's present in my life, it provided me with a lot of understanding of my own biological makeup. These things live in our bodies, in our DNA, and they're passed down. And so, when you see a lot of these issues that plague Indian Country, you know where they come from.” 

To learn more about NABS and support their work, visit https://boardingschoolhealing.org/