As part of truth-telling around boarding school history, access to boarding school records is paramount. The National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive (NIBSDA) was conceptualized early on to serve as a national digital platform and digital repository for boarding school archival collections throughout the United States. Making boarding school records more accessible to boarding school survivors and their descendants in a digital archive is essential to understanding this history and its consequences on Tribal Nations. Through cultivating historical insights, NIBSDA supports community-led healing initiatives throughout American Indian and Alaska Native Nations and towards restored Indigenous cultural sovereignty
NIBSDA will fulfill two components:
1) It serves as a presentation platform for the records and collections that NABS digitizes in-house from a variety of partner institutions who have boarding school relevant material;
2) It serves as a centralized hub in the form of an aggregator that will pull in a variety of digital collections or digital projects that, again, have or feature boarding school relevant material.
TEAM
National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
NABS works diligently together to uplift the voices of our relatives and have invested spiritual, mental, and intellectual energies to produce the the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archives which we hope will cast light upon this era of U.S. Indian policy that has profoundly impacted our communities.
PARTNERS
University of Minnesota, Liberal Arts Technology Innovative Services (LATIS)
LATIS houses and maintains NIBSDA’s Elevator-instance DAMS solution. Elevator is an open source cloud-based platform used for digital asset storage, organization, and display. Visit the LATIS Elevator Documentation webpage for more information.
Contributors and Collaborators
All of the digital items and catalog records featured in NIBSDA are a result of the meaningful exchange and coordination between these various academic, governmental, and cultural heritage institutions in the United States.