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- By Native News Online Staff
Former Indian boarding school attendees in and around New York are invited to participate in a listening session hosted by the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) in Oneida, New York, next week.
From August 26-29, NABS staff will conduct oral history interviews with those who sign up. In order to participate, NASBS says, you must have attended a federally supported boarding school before 1970.
Last September, The Department of the Interior granted NABS $4 million to support their existing work of gathering first-person survivor narratives and establishing an oral history collection of Indian boarding school survivors. Survivors will have the opportunity to make their interviews available to federal partners, Tribal governments, policymakers and researchers, and the public, according to the Interior Department.
The work complements the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, launched by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland in May 2022. The initiative called for a nine-month investigation into the fraught legacy of Indian Boarding Schools that the U.S. government ran or supported for a century and a half and resulted in two volumes of more than 100-page reports, penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland.
As part of Newland’s initial recommendations, Secretary Haaland launched “The Road to Healing,” a year-long tour in May 2022 to meet with boarding school survivors and their descendants across the country and hear their stories.
NABS’ work of collecting oral histories will add to Haaland’s Road to Healing work to build a permanent oral histories collection on federal Indian boarding schools.
To sign up for next week’s listening session, visit https://www.tfaforms.com/5092936. For a full list of federally supported Indian boarding schools, click here.
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Following the release of the U.S. Department of the Interior's final report, we at Native News Online took a moment to reflect on our extensive three-year effort to highlight the traumatic legacy of Indian boarding schools. By covering all 12 Road to Healing events and publishing over 250 articles, we have amplified survivors' voices and illuminated the lasting impact on Indigenous communities. Our work continues. Please consider donating to help fund our ongoing coverage of Indian boarding schools.
