Amelia Schafer
ICT
MILWAUKEE, Wisc. – The Chicago National Archives holds hundreds of thousands of Bureau of Indian Affairs records spanning nearly two centuries, but the site is set to close by the end of September.
There is no clear answer about where the documents are going or when they’ll next be accessible.
Once the site closes, it could take roughly two years for the documents to be made available again to tribal leaders, historic preservation officers and even the general public, according to an inter-agency email discussing the closure that was leaked to several news outlets at the end of June.
Documents stored at the National Archives can be crucial when it comes to assessing tribal enrollment rolls, accessing documentation of Indian trust funds and even uncovering information about the Federal Indian Boarding School era. There are maps, photos, court records, first-hand testimonies, Indigenous language materials, genealogies and more stored in the archives, all of which is at risk, according to tribal historians.
“It was never broadcasted to tribal governments, in fact, I’m not even sure there’s been a real public release of information,” Michael LaRonge, tribal historic preservation officer for the Sokagaon Band of Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin, told ICT.
LaRonge and others said they’d heard reports of the Chicago location closing at the end of September.
According to the leaked inter-agency email, San Francisco and Seattle’s National Archives are both slated to close as well.
“Something irreplaceable is at risk,” said Heather Hostler, a citizen of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and the executive director of California Indian Legal Services during a press conference on August 24 in San Francisco. “They are not the only way we know our history, but they are an important part of it, helping us to document the experiences of our ancestors and our sacred relationship with the United States. These records are priceless.”
Hostler said there is no clear information detailing where the records will end up.
“Decisions appear to be moving forward without meaningful tribal consultation and without a complete public understanding of what is at stake,” Hostler said during the press conference. “The United States has a trust responsibility to tribes and a duty to consult them in making decisions like the San Bruno closure. We know too well what happens when things are taken from Native people.”
Tribal Historical Preservation officers like LaRonge said they were left completely in the dark about the San Francisco site’s closure, a violation of the nation-to-nation relationship between the federal government and tribes.
Per the Administrative Procedure Act, public agencies must submit written notice to the public of their intentions in detail and allow for a public comment period. No such notice has occurred.
The National Archives has yet to issue a statement on the closures and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from ICT.
“Tribal consultation is supposed to kick in whenever there’s an effect on a tribal nation’s ability to govern themselves,” LaRonge said. “The materials there, there’s census records used by tribal enrollment offices, historical information. … there’s a host of other things [like] legal references to major Indigenous law cases all stored there. It’s kind of this odd pervasive problem.”
LaRonge said he and others from the Sokagoan community have been able to save up to travel to Chicago once a year for three years to access their records. As a result of those trips, the group has scanned copies of about 16,342 pages, LaRonge said.
It would be impossible to scan all relevant records prior to the archive’s closing. Records from the Lac Du Flambeau agency alone, which contains documents from other tribes such as Lac Du Flambeau and Red Cliff, contains over 300 linear feet of records, LaRonge said. None of those records are organized.
“We obviously don’t need all 300 linear feet, but we have to essentially go in person and search through those records because they’re not, they’re not really organized,” LaRonge said. “There’s no quick way to get through any of that archive material except to go and really kind of root through page by page.”
Through correspondence with Wisconsin state senators, LaRonge said he learned the current plan is for the records to be relocated to the Kansas City National Archives. The transition period would be lengthy, he said, with a predicted two to three year gap before any records would be accessible again.
“For people from northern Wisconsin, that’s quite a haul,” LaRonge said. “That’s going to make travel quite complex and then they try to ameliorate or kind of smooth over that fact by saying they would be willing to copy and ship records if travel was too difficult. The problem with that is the copy fees are 80 cents per page, and you’re talking 150 pages per folder with maybe up to 10 folders per box. So just to give you a rough idea, for the 16,342 pages that we have managed to scan, that [cost] would amount to roughly $13,073.60. That’s without shipping [costs].”
The cost to scan all 300 linear feet of documents for the tribe would be astronomical, he said.
Dorene Wiese, a White Earth Ojibwe elder and chief executive officer of the American Indian Association of Illinois, said she’s already been shut out of accessing documents at the Chicago location.
“It’s a plan of erasure,” Wiese told ICT. “I don’t have travel money to wherever they’re going. And most people in Chicago do not. Most people today we rely on the internet, we rely on things being digitized. I mean hotel costs and food, everything’s high. So I will say it’ll be a very small number of people, a much smaller number, [who will be] able to research those archives, and I think that’s part of the plan.”
Wiese said she’s the oldest oral historian in Chicago and has been researching the city’s Indigenous population since 1970, mostly thanks to the archives.
“It’s a huge loss for our community,” Wiese said.
Wiese attempted to schedule a visit to the Chicago location’s reading room to allow for a team of Indigenous youth to read through and find documents relating to their ancestors or even information regarding family members who had moved to the city following the Urban Relocation Act 70 years ago.
Established in 1956, the act encouraged Indigenous people to move to cities like Chicago with false promises of jobs, housing and general support. Today there are over 60,000 American Indian and Alaska Native people living in the city, according to a report from the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative, a local Indigenous non-profit. Wiese said nearly all of the individuals who moved to the city as part of the act have since died, making it difficult to piece together the community’s unique history.
Wiese said her visitation request has still not been approved after more than a month.
“I was interested in finding out really anything that would include tribes of people that had been [sent] here,” Wiese said. “[Information about] their families, their names, what kinds of experiences they had, where they went to school, where they went, where they worked, where they lived. … I wanted to try to get one last look at them before they moved.”
Aside from historical documents regarding the Urban Relocation Act, the archives also contain records of funding previously received by the community that has decreased over the years.
Wiese said she’s been actively seeking these documents.
Several tribes and tribal coalitions such as the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance have written letters to the National Archives and Research Administration asking for transparency and inquiring about the closures, LaRonge said.
Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-California, sponsored a bill on Aug. 20 called the National Archives Protection Act to attempt to prohibit the closure of National Archives locations. The bill has not been voted on yet.
There’s no clear reason as to why the archives are closing.
LaRonge said one explanation he’s heard is that it’s a cost saving measure.
“[But to me] It’s not really fiscal conservatism, it’s ideological,” LaRonge said. “You know, ‘we don’t want to fund X.’”
The previously threatened closure of the Seattle location was stopped in 2021 as the result of advocacy efforts by historians – Native and non-Native – LaRonge said.
The 29 federally recognized tribes of Washington and the state of Washington collectively launched a lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration in 2021 seeking to reverse the closure decision.
LaRonge said he’s hopeful something can happen to reverse the new wave of closures.
Roughly 17 staff members in Chicago face layoffs as a result of the closure, LaRonge said, a huge loss as those individuals were trained on how to locate specific information and quickly aid tribal nations.
“It takes time to really understand those collections to the point where you can actually be helpful instead of just kind of going and fetching boxes and putting them out there to understand what the tribes are actually looking for,” LaRonge said. “The loss of that is problematic.”
Additionally, it’s unclear if the collections will be split up during the move or if they’ll be kept together in bulk, he said.
“They’re going into an existing facility,” LaRonge said, questioning how much space would be available. “Will the new staff understand what they have and know where to fit things? … They’re just there’s not going to be anybody there that really understands what they have.”
