Professor Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s Project Return will launch nationally in October in an effort to support Native Nations.
In the dimly lit rooms of the National Archives, Joe Maxwell recalled digging through what he described as “the bowels” of the U.S. government as he and other student research assistants sifted through boxes full of paperwork as a part of Project Return, a nationwide project set to launch officially in October.
The project’s goal is to return documents to the survivors of Native American boarding schools who were taken from their families and attended abusive classrooms.
These residential schools, which were located across the U.S., Canada, and more than 526 of which were federally funded, according to The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, were often the site of abduction, acculturation, abuse, and death, with the U.S. Department of the Interior reporting at least 973 children died while attending these schools.
Many people who survived were unaware documents from their time in the schools even existed. Report cards, photographs, and letters sent to and from the families of the children remained unreturned.
“Most Indian boarding school survivors that I’ve ever met were not aware that there were records in the National Archives,” Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz said, the director of the Native Policy Lab and a UI associate professor of practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs.
Schuettpelz was recently awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to fund Project Return in July.
“Part of the reason that I do this is that they don’t know they exist, and the process for getting them is not straightforward,” she said.
As a part of the pilot for Project Return, the program partnered with the Chickasaw Nation, which provided Schuettpelz and the student research assistants with a list of student records they were interested in having repatriated and returned to their rightful owners.
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