Hundreds of Indigenous survivors have wept, laughed, and spoken openly — many for the very first time — about what they endured as children in Native American boarding schools. For decades, those stories stayed buried. Now, a major oral history effort is giving them a place to finally be heard.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is concluding its oral history project this Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The nonprofit’s team of historians has gathered video testimony from more than 360 Indigenous survivors spread across 19 states. Those recordings are destined for permanent preservation in the Library of Congress.
Iona Mad Plume, a 74-year-old Blackfeet woman who grew up on her tribe’s reservation in Montana, said she “can’t emphasize enough” how much the experience helped her heal. She sat before a video camera last month in Billings and shared her story of attending the Pierre Indian School in South Dakota, where she was sent at just 14 years old.
Since giving her testimony, Mad Plume said she has felt more grounded and has found it easier to release memories that long haunted her — a dusty blue Greyhound bus pulling her away from her parents’ red pickup truck, school staff striking her with a wooden dowel as she huddled on a bunk bed, and meals of cornmeal or cereal crawling with weevil bugs.
“I got a lot out of that, pretty much a lot of closure,” she said. “It was after almost a lifetime of carrying around questions and different things in my mind — so I don’t have to carry that around anymore.”
Another survivor, Gene Bozicic, of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, shared a similar sense of renewal after contributing her testimony in Michigan in 2024. Bozicic, now 81, attended the Catholic-run Holy Childhood School of Jesus in Harbor Springs, Michigan, starting at age 11.
“As we further went along, I started to feel more confident in what I could do and what I have accomplished, almost like more pride to be Native,” Bozicic said about her video interview. “I hate to see it coming to an end, because they have given me my backbone back.”
The project launched in March 2024 as a partnership between the Minnesota-based coalition and the U.S. Department of the Interior. Its mission is to document and make public the widespread abuse that boarding school survivors endured under the federal government’s forced assimilation policies — a system that began in the 1800s and continued for more than a century.
Two years before the oral history effort began, former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — a Laguna Pueblo member and herself a descendant of boarding school survivors — led the historic Road to Healing listening tour alongside Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community.
Haaland’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative also produced detailed reports on the long-term, multigenerational damage caused by these institutions. The federal government found that nearly 1,000 Native children were buried at 65 different school sites. Reports documented atrocities ranging from physical and sexual abuse to deliberate attempts at cultural erasure.
Over the course of more than two years, the process of collecting in-person testimonies evolved significantly, said Lacey Kinnart, the coalition’s oral history program co-director. At first, a “quiet room” where survivors could decompress with a fellow elder after their interview was optional. Staff later made it a standard part of the process and added a second such room. They also began pairing survivors with a licensed clinical therapist specializing in boarding school trauma and a licensed social worker.
“Our elders don’t want to be a burden,” said Kinnart, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. “But they really do need that extra support.”
Staff also observed that survivors sometimes felt uneasy around the Indigenous photographer, which showed in the portraits taken. In response, an extra half-hour was added to each session so survivors could get comfortable with the person photographing them.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Department of the Interior are still working out how to present the video interviews publicly. Importantly, survivors retain full ownership of their testimonies and have the sole authority to decide whether their stories are shared with the public. The videos will be stored in a permanent oral history collection at the Library of Congress, with the project’s official end date set for June 2027.
The coalition plans to continue oral history work independently. Staff indicated their next project could cost as much as $13 million — roughly double the $6.2 million received from the Interior Department and the Mellon Foundation for this first effort. Though it would take longer, the next project aims to be even more inclusive.
“We’re just scratching the surface with these stories,” said coalition Oral History Program Co-director Charlee Brissette, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie of Chippewa Indians. “We want to get a more robust picture of the boarding school experience because it does have that intergenerational effect.”
Indigenous people who were not included in this first round of the project may have another chance to participate in the coming years — a prospect welcomed by both survivors and their descendants.
“I’d be interested in doing that, because the whole story needs to be taught,” said Desiray Emerton, 56, a Seminole woman and a descendant of two generations of boarding school survivors. Her relatives attended Goodland Academy and Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma.
Emerton said she has witnessed the generational toll firsthand: her mother, shaped by her own boarding school experiences, struggled to show affection toward her as a child. And her grandmother passed away long before this project ever existed.
“I know time’s running out for those who did go through that personally,” Emerton said, “but I always tell my kids I’m walking on the prayers of our ancestors, and I’m running out of time.”
