Data for Our Little Relatives: Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indian Residential Boarding Schools
In order to begin the path toward healing, people need to know what happened to the children who entered, but never left the Indian boarding schools. This research addresses the question: How can GPR and Magnetometry help tribal sovereignty, as well as Indian families and communities, hold the United States accountable for the Indian children taken into US custody under it’s Indian Boarding School Policy? It has been documented that children had to bury children and that school and church records did not track all of the deaths at the boarding schools. My research site is two Indian boarding schools, one a government-run, off-reservation Indian boarding school and the other, a church-run, on-reservation Indian boarding school. At each school, I compare numbers and names (where possible) of graves with schools records. I will interview two school attendees who are alleged to have participated in the burial of fellow students. This information will be part of a remedy, a reconnection through locating the stolen and kidnapped children who are lost in the Indian boarding school cemeteries. The geophysical surveys and archival research will provide that horizon using premium data to quantify the location of burials and if possible, to identify who remains in the grave.
A primary objective is to provide all concerned agencies premium quality data to enable collaboration for socio-economic programs addressing the intergenerational trauma culminating from the boarding school era.
Overall, the data will assist in the Truth and Reconciliation, or rather, Truth, Transparency, and Transformation between the United States and the Tribes/Nations embedded in the original lands. This will empower Tribal Sovereignty and possible restitution to those people whose children were stolen or kidnapped.