| STEPHEN R. CURLEY (Navajo/Diné), Director of Digital Archives, National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

Driven by the mission of leading in the pursuit of understanding and addressing the ongoing impacts of the U.S. Indian Boarding School policy, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition’s National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA) was conceptualized to serve as a national authoritative digital repository and database for boarding school documentation. This project will focus on the national boarding school context and will function to catalog key information about all 523 identified institutions to inform an ecosystem of research, data management, and community collaboration in powerful and unprecedented ways. This session will explore engagement strategies, curation frameworks, and possible solutions to asserting community voices on dispersed archival collections from a variety of institutional contexts. Making these records more accessible to boarding school survivors and their descendants in a digital archive is essential to understanding this history and its many impacting consequences on Tribal Nations.