Access to Truth, Healing, and Justice

Abstract

This chapter will discuss how the National Native American Boarding School (NABS) Healing Coalition is using technology to present information about U.S. Indian boarding schools and facilitate increased research in pursuit of truth, healing, and justice. In particular, we examine how a digital archive supports coalition initiatives like locating children who went missing, facilitating tribal repatriation from boarding school cemeteries, and informing community-led healing across Tribal Nations. Technology allows us to take previously disparate boarding school records scattered across multiple archives and not only make them widely available for analysis in an archive, but also facilitate new forms of interpretation through other digital tools like mapping, digital exhibits, and other digital public history formats. Finally, we will detail how NABS—an organization whose board and executive staff are 100% Native American—is prioritizing tribal consultation and collaboration to support data sovereignty and inform our decisions about what should (and should not) be digitized and how this history should be represented. We expect our use of these technologies to reshape the way research around the history of boarding schools is done and how we understand the boarding school era and its true impacts.