A conversation with a friend's uncle about his experience at an Indian boarding school kickstarted what would become a multi-year project that makes student records accessible to survivors. Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the director of the Native Policy Lab at the University of Iowa, which is spearheading Project Return.
Schuettpelz said she learned through this conversation that this elder had never seen a picture of himself as a child.
"And in my mind, it started this wheel moving of 'well, surely there's something that exists, right?'" Schuettpelz recalled. "And then I started questioning, 'well, what would exist?' So say you're a survivor of a boarding school, is there anything inside the National Archives or otherwise that has your name on it?"
Schuettpelz said she was able to help track down and return his records from boarding school, some of which he had never seen.
"Inside of them were really personal notes written by his mom, his sister," Schuettpelz said. "He's in his mid-80s. And so I know that for him, it was a huge and very meaningful experience to have those records back."
This is exactly what Project Return aims to do. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a team at the lab will help boarding school survivors find copies of their records from their time at boarding schools.
Currently, the project is in the pilot phase and is only working with survivors who are members of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Dawn Standridge is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and works at the Wheelock Academy Historic Site, which includes the surviving buildings of a former boarding school that began operations in the 1830s and closed down in 1955. Three of her family members attended Wheelock, including her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Later in its history, the school was only for young women and girls.
"We were a missionary school, a school run by missionaries that the Choctaw General Council had a hand in from the very beginning," Standridge said. "So the experiences are going to be a little bit different, maybe not entirely different, from what you're going to be hearing from federal boarding schools."
Wheelock Academy is one of nearly 100 boarding schools that operated in Oklahoma, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. As Standridge noted, experiences from boarding schools vary, as do the records that exist, ranging from pictures and letters to medical information.
Standridge said she's glad her community will have access to this information.
"It's going to be a good thing because we'll get to learn more," Standridge said. "And we want to talk about it. And then some of that, I believe, will bring some healing."
The hope, Schuettpelz said, is to expand this service to all survivors of boarding schools by the end of the year.
"There's some urgency around that kind of work because obviously as the years go on, survivors are getting older and I think it's really important that we try and do this as quickly as we can responsibly," Schuettpelz said. "And so that really is the impetus for this national portal that will go live again by the end of the year."
Schuettpelz noted the Project Return team must receive permission first before retrieving the records, and all returned records are confidential. Ultimately, the project will break down barriers by providing this service free of charge and the headaches of tracking down documents.
If survivors wanted to get their records without utilizing help from Project Return, Schuettpelz said they would have to either visit the archives in person or request them by email, which costs $0.80 per page.
"There's landmines all along the process," Schuettpelz said. "And it's not an easy one to navigate."
Survivors who participate and are able to receive copies of their records have the option to get them either through email or paper mail, depending on what they request.
Choctaw boarding school survivors interested in being a part of the project can visit Native Policy Lab's website to learn more, or pick up an Indian Boarding School Records Request form at the Wheelock Academy Historic Site or a Choctaw community center.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
