Amelia Schafer
ICT
A nearly three-year long tour across the United States gathering oral histories from survivors of the Indian boarding school era ends this month, with a final event being hosted June 22-26 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The oral history project provides space for survivors of boarding schools who attended prior to 1970 to share their experiences through professional video interviews. Those interviews will later become part of a permanent collection within the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.
“This is going to have such an impact across generations,” said Charlee Brissette, who is Anishinaabe (Odawa / Sault St. Marie Ojibwe) and the Oral History Program co-director. “These stories will be preserved for generations, and people, our own communities, will be able to learn from them. The general public will be able to learn from them directly from those that experienced these institutions.”
The project began as part of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which has worked to acknowledge, document and reckon with boarding school survivors’ experiences.
Sharing stories of survival is a crucial step in healing, said Boarding School Healing Coalition organizers. Whether happy or sad, all stories are welcome.
“Part of this project is that we want to hear all of the stories, the good, the bad,” said Lacey Kinnart, who is also Anishinaabe from the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Ojibwe and an Oral History Program co-director. “(This is) for them to be able to share in this environment and to be believed because for a long time they said they weren’t believed or to validate them. It just gives them this experience that they haven’t had, likely they haven’t had.”
Tens of thousands of American Indian and Alaska Native children attended boarding schools during what is referred to as the Indian boarding school era, which refers to a roughly 150-year stretch from 1819 to 1970 in which Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to schools aimed at assimilating them into European-American society. Those schools were often federally operated or run by Christian organizations funded by the federal government.
Children at those schools were frequently subjected to militarized education with intense manual labor and often corporal punishment. The Department of Interior has identified roughly 1,000 deaths that it believes were caused by the federal boarding schools. However, that number is likely a gross underestimate, with some reports detailing over 3,000 deaths, and the search for other victims continues.
The oral history project began in Oklahoma City in early 2024 and will end right back in Oklahoma after two-and-a-half years of traveling across the country, having made 22 stops along the way.
“We were asked to return to Oklahoma to close in a good way,” Brissette said. “For that opening ceremony (in Oklahoma City), we opened a door. We brought the ancestors in and you know they’ve been looking out for us and watching over us during this project as we’ve been traveling and gathering these stories over the last couple of years and so we’re really excited to be going back and to be closing it you know in a good way, the way that we started.”
The upcoming Tulsa event, which is by appointment only, will run from June 22 until June 26.
“The elders that have chosen to share their stories are very courageous,” Brissette said. “It takes a lot of strength and courage to share these stories.”
The event kicks off with a community feast that is open to everyone, not just survivors or project participants. From June 23-26, organizers will conduct private interviews with survivors. On Friday, June 26, the project ends with a ceremony and an opportunity to honor those who have made the project possible.
“It’s not just wrapping up that week, but it’s wrapping up this whole project, which is a historic, first-of-its-kind oral history project,” Kinnart said.
Both Brissette and Kinnart are descendants of boarding school survivors and both said working on this project has, in turn, helped them heal.
“It helps us personally by seeing, hearing a story from a survivor and (knowing) that happened in my family too,” Kinnart said. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime.”
And each of the 22 stops will have served as a space for survivors to heal through being seen, supported and understood.
“Almost every single week, we hear from survivors that they feel a sense of relief after sharing their story,” Brissette said. “I don’t think that it’s just a matter of them sharing their story and then that’s it, I think it’s a matter of sharing their story in a safe space in this container that we’ve created with relatives. Our team is all Indigenous, we all have connections to the boarding school legacy, and so we know that we have to treat it with care and compassion and empathy.”
She said many of the project participants have expressed that they’ve been living with and hanging onto their story for decades.
“We often say that we’re not the healers. However, we try to create a safe space and a sacred space for that healing to happen,” Brissette said. “We’ve seen it (healing) have ripple effects across the families. It’s absolutely been a life-changing experience to be a part of this project.”
By preserving stories for generations to come, communities will hopefully be able to learn from survivors and see first-hand the resilience of their own people, Brissette said.
It takes a lot of strength and courage for survivors to share their stories because it can be very hard, Kinnart said. Survivors were shamed and conditioned into keeping their stories secret, she said. It wasn’t until recently that many felt comfortable to come forward and talk about their experiences.
The boarding school project as a whole, started by former Secretary of the Derpartment of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is Laguna Pueblo, marks a first step toward coming to terms with the role that the U.S. government played in the continued genocide of Indigenous people.
“It’s never been acknowledged the way that it has through this initiative,” Brissette said. “And there’s no oral history collection created that is like this. So it is historic. It’s a milestone.”
Even after the project concludes, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition will continue the project as an organization, separate from the ongoing federal initiative by the Department of Interior to investigate the impact of boarding schools. As the project evolves, the coalition aims to include interviews with descendants of survivors. Many of those who attended boarding schools have already died, but their stories live on through those they trusted them with, an aspect of the boarding school legacy that organizers weren’t able to address through the current project.
The upcoming continuation, nicknamed the Oral History Project 2.0, will expand to interview individuals over a span of five years.
The coalition will also continue to advocate for the passage of a Truth and Healing Commission Bill, similar to a bill passed in 2008 in Canada. The Canadian Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006 set five different guidelines for the nation in addressing the impact of residential schools on more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children. One guideline established Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008. Another guideline established compensation for survivors in 2007. So far, more than $3 billion in Canadian dollars has been paid to survivors. Canada’s last residential school closed in 1997.
The United States has historically lagged behind Canada in terms of reckoning with or even acknowledging the disastrous impacts of boarding schools.
“I have hope that we become whole again, that we get back to a place where we were pre-colonization, and that the amount of money that was spent to eradicate and murder and assimilate and indoctrinate us, all that money, I hope two to three times that amount is put back into Indian Country to bring us back whole again and to be proud of who we are,” Kinnart said.
The United States spent an estimated $23.3 billion today’s currency on federal Indian boarding schools from 1871 to 1969, according to the Department of Interior’s findings, published in 2024 as the result of a three-year investigation. The report calls for an equivalent amount of money dedicated toward rebuilding Indigenous families and communities.
However, a lawsuit filed in 2025 by the Wichita and Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California said that $23.3 billion amount doesn’t scratch the surface of the vast losses experienced by Indian Country. The lawsuit claims that tribes often footed the bill for the maintenance and upkeep of schools through their tribal trust accounts, a claim that the 2024 federal report supports.
But the federal report doesn’t address the amount of revenue generated through forced child labor utilized at the schools, according to the Wichita and Washoe lawsuit. Children in boarding schools often completed “outings” during the day where they’d be sent to non-Native households to complete household tasks, farm work or even railroad construction. The lawsuit calls for a thorough and complete audit of all finances related to the federal boarding school era.
Currently, a congressional bill seeks similar relief. The bill, S. 761, would establish a new five-person federal commission called the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies.
The commission would be tasked with formally investigating, documenting and reporting on the histories of Indian boarding schools, Indian boarding school policies, and the systemic and long-term effects of those schools on Indigenous people. Commission members would then develop recommendations for federal efforts based on its findings and recommendations or pathways to support survivors and descendants in healing.
The senate version of the bill, S.761, has mostly stalled, with no further action taken since it was placed on the Senate calendar on July 31, 2025, despite it being unanimously passed by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in March 2025. This year, on Feb. 3, congresswoman Sharice Davids (D-KS), who is Ho-Chunk, and Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK), who is Chickawsaw, reintroduced the bi-partisan bill to the House of Representatives as House Resolution 7325.
The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition continues to push for the bill’s passage.
“We as a country know about the Holocaust, and you hear people that don’t know about boarding schools,” Kinnart said. “They don’t even know about the the genocide that happened on these lands in this country, and that needs to change.”
Kinnart said one hopeful takeaway from the project is the potential for educators and researchers around the United States to create new curriculum and standards to better educate the American public on the nation’s treatment of Indigenous peoples.
“Native American history is American history,” Kinnart said. “All Americans deserve to know what happened on these lands. When we hear from the general public, non-Native people, who only just found out about boarding schools, they’re (often) mad that they didn’t know about this prior.”
Interview slots are limited for the final stop on the oral history project tour, so organizers stress early registration. Interviews are by appointment only and only offered to boarding school survivors who attended federally supported schools prior to or during 1970.
Tulsa event details:
WHEN: Monday, June 22-Friday, June 26
TIME: Interviews by appointment only
WHERE: DoubleTree by Hilton Tulsa Downtown, 616 W. 7th St., Tulsa, OK 74127
MORE INFO/REGISTRATION: https://www.tfaforms.com/5092936or call 651-650-4445
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