Dec. 10—U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland joined dozens of fellow Indigenous New Mexicans last year in a casino ballroom where they engaged in a painful exercise: sharing their experiences with federal Indian boarding schools.
The Isleta Resort & Casino was the second-to-last stop in October 2023 for a nationwide “Road to Healing” tour. Interior Department officials, including Haaland, were tasked with listening to stories about schools designed to forcefully assimilate Native youth to white American culture.
These histories of the Indian boarding school system will become part of the Library of Congress’s collection and form the basis of exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
The Interior Department announced this week the next step in its yearslong Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative: a plan to preserve oral histories and promulgate education resources and exhibits in partnership with the Library of Congress and Smithsonian museum.
“For decades, this terrible chapter was hidden from our history books, but now, our Administration’s work and these partnerships will ensure that no one will ever forget,” Haaland said in a statement Monday.
Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo, announced start of the initiative in 2021. In the years since, the effort has resulted in the 12-stop Road to Healing, an oral history project and the release of two extensive reports detailing the often-abusive conditions at Indian boarding schools.
President Joe Biden issued a formal apology in October for the “sin on our soul” of Indian boarding schools at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.
Also Monday, Biden established Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument on the site of a former school in Carlisle, Pa., that “subjected 7,800 Indian children from more than 140 Tribes to its coercive form of education,” according to Biden’s proclamation. It is the 432nd site in the National Park Service’s system.
The Interior Department’s new partnership with the Library of Congress and National Museum of American History is intended to spread awareness of the boarding schools’ history.
“Ensuring this history is told is just the beginning of a long effort to heal our nation,” Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said in a statement.
A memorandum of understanding between the Interior Department and the museum tasks museum staff with developing “a dynamic, multi-modal public history project” in collaboration with tribal communities and scholars. The project will include an in-person exhibit, online components and resources for teachers and students.
The Library of Congress, meanwhile, will preserve a series of first-person stories tied to the schools. The collection will join the library’s American Folklife Center, which offers up thousands of digitized pieces of history for public perusal online.
“The Library of Congress is honored to be entrusted with the stewardship of these important, albeit painful, oral histories,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement.
The effort will ensure histories of the boarding schools endure, Haaland said — and receive the acknowledgement they merit.
“We are here because our ancestors persevered. Their stories — our stories — are everywhere — in the air we breathe and the land we walk on,” she said. “We tell those stories because Native American history is American history.”