Nancy Marie Spears
The Imprint
This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.
They’ve come from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. From the Ojibwe and Inupiaq. Smoke rises from bundles of sweetgrass, cedar and sage as they tell their stories of surviving Indian boarding schools.
For some, the recounting is not new. They bring weathered black-and-white family photos to honor relatives lost. Others, until now, have never disclosed their still-raw childhood trauma.
Across the country, a group of traveling Indigenous oral historians are there to listen, and to record these vital first-person narratives. They are part of an ongoing collaboration between the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the U.S. Department of the Interior. The goal is to more fully document the systemic abuse endured by generations of Indigenous people under the government’s attempts at forced assimilation that began in the 1800s and lasted for over a century.
Ramona Klein, a 77-year-old from North Dakota shared a particularly harrowing memory with the historians, tribal officials and spiritual leaders who gathered in Bismarck, North Dakota in June to support the survivors.
She remembered a “big, green bus.” It carried Klein and her five siblings away from their sobbing mother and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians to the militaristic Fort Totten Indian Boarding School. When the children arrived in 1954, she said, they met a matron who meted out beatings with a wooden paddle that school staff called “the board of education.”
The first-of-its-kind oral history project, underway since March, receives and archives these memories. Three historians and a team of an additional 10 to 12 people have so far visited Indigenous communities in Oklahoma, Alaska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Michigan, and will continue their work through 2026.
Their holistic approach recognizes that painful narratives cannot be collected without caring for the people who experienced the trauma.
“Many times people feel a sense of lightness after sharing their story,” said Charlee Brissette, a Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians tribal member and oral history project team lead. “But everybody’s story is unique, and when it comes to talking about abuse, sometimes they don’t always feel light in that moment.”
In each location, video interviews begin and end in a circle, in accordance with Indigenous practices. Interviewees share in spaces made sacred. An altar set up at each site offers traditional medicine set in an abalone shell alongside eagle and crow feathers. Participants are provided native food reflective of each region — smoked salmon and moose in Alaska and smoked trout in Michigan. Powwow songs, deerskin drumming and other performances are provided by artists including Salish Spirit Canoe Family, Osage Tribal Singers, and the Alaska Native Heritage Dancers.
Indigenous psychologists stand by onsite, ready to suggest a pause for water or nourishment, or some time to decompress at the beading table.
“I don’t know if I would have felt that same sense of healing in the absence of those things,” said James LaBelle. He recounted his time at two Bureau of Indian Affairs schools during his interview in Anchorage, Alaska in April. “It would have been a stark, cold interview.”
Archiving the legacy
The oral history project is part of the broader Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative — a comprehensive examination into the lingering impact of boarding schools on Indigenous children and their families. Launched in June 2021 by Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland, the undertaking is being carried out by the same government entity responsible for the creation of the boarding schools. Haaland, of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, is the nation’s first Indigenous cabinet secretary and herself a descendant of survivors.
The first-ever effort has also included two investigative reports released by the Interior Department in 2022 and earlier this year, as well as a 12-stop Road to Healing tour that offered survivors the opportunity to share their experiences with Haaland and other federal officials.
In 2023, the department granted the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition $3.7 million to establish an archive of video interviews with former students — the federal initiative’s final piece. The oral component will complement a database featuring an interactive map of school locations and a timeline of how long schools operated, according to archival records.
The Department of the Interior and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History are now exploring how to share the project with the public. But survivors will have full ownership of their interviews — and they will decide whether their stories will be made public, said Samuel Torres, senior director of the oral history project and deputy CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The benefits of ceremony
Beginning in 1819, the U.S. government forcibly removed thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities, ordering them to boarding schools across the nation. At these institutions, American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian children were stripped of their languages, religions and cultural beliefs. There were 523 Indian boarding schools across 38 states in the U.S. Most were established and supported by the federal government; some were run by religious institutions.
Over centuries, children in boarding schools were physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Others died. Burial sites have been located at 53 schools, and the Interior Department’s investigation has tallied nearly 1,000 deaths of school children, buried in 74 marked or unmarked graves across 65 school sites.
The federal government’s effort to document first-person accounts of these historical wrongs has some historical precedent. The personal narratives of some of the 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II are housed in the U.S. Library of Congress. In the 1930s, the oral histories of more that 2,300 formerly enslaved people were collected as part of the Federal Writers’ Project.
But the attention to ceremony and healing is what makes this oral history project unique. Boarding school survivors who share their stories are referred to as “narrators.’’
The Minnesota-based National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition was selected for the job because of the nonprofit’s reputation for “survivor-centered” protocols, according to the Interior Department. Torres, the project’s lead researcher, described the work as a reclamation of cultural identities that boarding schools robbed from Indigenous children. It also honors relatives who never came home.
“When we open the ceremony and invite our ancestors, they are there with us,” he said. “When we ask the questions — and when individuals respond — the spirits of the ancestors live in those responses, they live in this process.”
Torres hopes this holistic method becomes a model for Indigenous research. The work is tailored to the rituals of each tribal nation, and their particular customs and traditions.
“Our visits are intentionally designed, not simply to be uniform events, but to be reflective of the people, the place, and traditions of the land we are visiting,” Torres said. In Alaska, a ceremonial oil lamp is lit. In Oklahoma, participants joined the lighting of the cedar ceremony. But regardless of particular differences, the inclusion of ancestral spirits remains.
Medical anthropologist Spero Manson, director of the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health, described the benefits of ceremony and traditional healing practices, which are utilized by a number of Indigenous health care providers. Manson, who is Little Shell Chippewa, has observed the approach in his work with Navajo war veterans who’ve survived combat. He said the approach helps survivors overcome trauma and find meaning in experiences that have otherwise disrupted their lives.
“We’ve had whole generations of Native people who have been disenfranchised and marginalized from how to parent effectively, how to contribute to their extended families and their communities,” Manson said. “What these ceremonies do is they bring us back in. They’re part of the reintegration process.”
‘What does healing look like?’
Outreach for the oral history project is being conducted through news outlets, social media and word of mouth. After signing a consent form, participants review the questions that will be asked, and agree to sittings with Indigenous photographers and videographers. Each interview can take an hour or longer. So far, more than 100 have been completed, involving between 13 and 29 survivors in each site.
The interviews take into account that not everyone confronted abuse or trauma at boarding schools. Historian Brissette said the intentional questions about the healing process come at the end of interviews for all who share their stories. They include: “What does healing look like for you?” and “Why did you feel compelled to share your story with us?”
Last month, the project traveled to Harbor Springs, Michigan, to meet Indigenous elders and their families. Brissette’s relatives were among them. Her uncle, cousins and mother attended Holy Childhood School of Jesus in Harbor Springs, the state’s first federally run school.
“When I first started learning about boarding schools 15 years ago, I found out my mom had attended,” Brissette said. “I was mind-blown because I’ve learned what boarding schools were for, I’d heard all of the atrocities about them, so this work is very personal to me — and my family’s experiences definitely informs the work I do.”
Although the video interview required her to relive harsh memories, Klein, of Crystal Springs, spoke positively about her retelling experience. She said she felt respected, not pressured, to recall her most vulnerable moments.
“Ceremony is crucial because for so many of us survivors, we lost that,” Klein said.
She has since given back to the project, by working as a volunteer when historians visited North Dakota and Montana. Through that effort, Klein was able to give fellow narrators and their descendants the same care she received during her interview. She poured warm cups of coffee, and offered prayers and a shoulder to cry on. She ferried people to and from airports. And afterward, she thanked other survivors for their attendance in carefully crafted notes.
The final project site visits for 2024 will be Utah and Hawaii. Next spring, the nonprofit will visit the Oneida Indian Nation’s homelands in New York. Colorado, Washington and a return to Alaska are also on the travel agenda.
LaBelle, a Native village of Port Graham member, told historians his story in Anchorage last April. He attended Wrangell Institute and Mt. Edgecumbe High School in southeast Alaska between 1955 and 1965.
He was 8 years old when he was taken, along with his younger brother, Kermit, from his mother. Now 77, LaBelle said he witnessed unchecked, widespread abuse during his decade at boarding schools.
Some children didn’t live at the schools year-round and were likely thrilled to return home at the year’s end. But not LaBelle. He’d lost all connection to his mother, her Inupiaq language and customs. When she died, he recounted, he didn’t — couldn’t — cry at her funeral.
Looking back, he asks himself why. What happened that caused such shame and estrangement?
“It’s only because of time, distance and age that I was able to look back and try to analyze what happened to me,” LaBelle said. “And of course, it was boarding school that happened to me.”
This article was first published by The Imprint and republished with permission.