A Collaboration of Indigenous Truthtelling of Boarding Schools

This episode features voices from a panel on the collaboration, “Indigenous Truthtelling of Boarding Schools,” held at the University of Oklahoma in August 2025 and funded by a NHPRC-Mellon Planning Grant for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History and Ethnic Studies. The panelists share their experiences studying Native American boarding schools and discuss plans for a digital edition with scholars at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, Northeastern State University, Utah State University, and Indigenous communities. The project connects universities and archives with Native Nations and communities to develop educational resources about boarding schools and to expand public access to records, oral histories, and community knowledge.

This episode includes:

Farina King (Navajo Nation citizen), professor of Native American Studies at OU and co-host of Native Circles. She researches Indigenous histories, especially boarding school experiences, and collaborates on projects linking oral histories, archives, and community engagement.

Sarah Milligan, head of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at OSU. She partners with the Chilocco National Alumni Association to digitize memorabilia, record oral histories, and create educational tools that support truthtelling and remembrance.

Teagan Dreyer (Choctaw descendant), PhD candidate in history at OSU. She researches the impacts of boarding schools on Native identity and community resilience.

Erin Dyke, associate professor of curriculum studies at OSU. She focuses on truthtelling, Indigenous-led education initiatives, and transforming curriculum to confront legacies of colonial schooling.

Asa (Ace) Samuels (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes citizen), first-generation OU student. He mentors Native youth in cultural practices and serves as a facilitator for Mending Broken Hearts, a healing program addressing intergenerational trauma linked to boarding schools.

Kelly Berry (Apache Tribe of Oklahoma citizen), a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Native American Studies at OU. Berry is a descendant of boarding school survivors and researches histories of Indian boarding schools, including Carlisle, Chilocco, and early mission schools.

Blaine McLain, head archivist of Special Collections at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He manages archival collections related to the Cherokee National seminaries and regional histories.

Britton Morgan, undergraduate student research assistant at NSU from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He works with NSU archives, focusing on materials related to Indian boarding schools.

Michelle Martin, independent scholar in Arizona and former NSU faculty. She studies the Tullahassee Mission School and the legacies of interracial marriage tied to boarding schools. 

Cheyenne Widdecke, master’s student in anthropology at OU, specializing in archaeology. As a Graduate Research Assistant, she surveys archival collections, examines boarding school site records, and conducts oral history research with the Sac and Fox Nation.

Mary Harjo (citizen of the Muscogee/Creek Nation), boarding school alumna. She attended federal Indian boarding schools from 1st through 12th grade and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work at OU. A survivor of discrimination and abuse, she became a social worker and mentor, sharing her lived experiences to inform truthtelling and healing efforts.

Transcript

My name is Farina King, and you are listening to a special edition of Native Circles, featuring a roundtable with a special group of guests who contribute to a growing collaboration that addresses Indian Boarding Schools.

For generations, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were forced to attend boarding schools away from their families throughout the U.S. and Canada. These children were punished for speaking their languages, forced to cut their hair and wear clothing and eat food they were unfamiliar with. The purpose was to destroy Native American and First Nations’ cultures and peoplehood. 

The history of these atrocities is being well-documented thanks to historians and many others such as the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, and is being brought to light thanks to former Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021.

Thanks to the support of a planning grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), under the National Archives, and the Mellon Foundation, a new collaboration among the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, Northeastern State University, and Utah State University will launch a “digital edition” to provide the public better access to boarding school histories.

At its core, this is an educational resource – a place where archival records, oral histories, and community memory come together to teach the public about the boarding school era and constellation of Native American experiences in boarding schools.

“And we received a planning grant to collaborate across teams, partners that are based at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, Northeastern State University, and Utah State University, to link and connect the work that we do to develop what is called a digital edition, which basically is a kind of educational resource featuring primary sources, especially archival kinds of materials, but specifically about Native American boarding schools in Oklahoma and Utah and hopefully, throughout the United States, because this is related to that overarching effort of how we teach and learn about Native American boarding schools in the United States really in the ways of respect, reciprocity, relevance and responsibility, the teachings of the four Rs that we often learn about in Indigenous Studies and circles.”

Last fall in September 2024, some of those alumni and partners gathered for a workshop, bringing voices together across generations, and on August 26, 2025, these contributors gathered again in a second workshop to inform the public about their work at the University of Oklahoma in the Native Nations Center for Tribal Policy Research.

I collaborate with Utah State University on projects related to Native American boarding school histories. I highlight the critical work being done with Intermountain Indian boarding school alumni, focusing on a school that served Diné (or Navajo Nation) students from 1950 to 1974 and later became inter-tribal from 1974 to 1984. I contributed to Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School, a traveling exhibit showcasing the arts and creative writing of Diné students who were separated from their families and homelands. A book also came from the project.

I emphasize the importance of acknowledging the full spectrum of Native boarding school experiences, including trauma, resilience, and creativity, across various Indigenous communities, including Kanaka Maoli and Alaska Native populations. Part of my work involves preserving student-created wall murals and supporting ethical, community-centered research. I encourage engagement with available resources, such as materials from the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University and USU Libraries.

Based in Oklahoma, I recognize the deep local history of boarding schools and the interconnectedness of communities affected by these systems. I prioritize relationality, being a good relative, and long-term, multigenerational work, advocating for ongoing care, education, and critical reflection on the past, present, and future of Native American education.

I am also one of many collaborators in this project, each of whom brings a different skillset to the organization that better supports this great work. 

Sarah Milligan is a professor and head of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at the Oklahoma State University Library. As a librarian, she works alongside boarding school organizations and Native Nations to preserve stories that they think are important to preserve. 

“So, we answered basically a question from the Chilocco National Alumni Association, who are thinking about starting some oral history work with their members and with their 40 their boarding schoolers and their community. And just had some logistical questions. And you know, out of those questions came, how can we help out where you need it. And 10 years later, we've helped digitize their memorabilia collection. We've conducted interviews with them. We've gone to a lot of alumni association reunions for alumni readings, more generally, helped create a documentary about the school and about the people and help support some curriculum development to try and bring some of those primary source and first hand stories and context into classrooms, so as the steward of the sort of digital access to the memorabilia collection and continue to work really closely with different parts of that community.”

Teagan Dreyer, a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma citizen, is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University’s history department and works with Milligan at OSU’s library.

“I am the daughter of two educators, and my dad's first teaching job was at Sequoyah High school, which is sort of a boarding school, and so I grew up with that as its identity of my mind. And then going through school or going through growing up, I was around a lot of Muscogee elders who attended boarding schools, Chilocco, Fort Sill in school, being a being two that come to mind. And then when I entered my master's program, I was the daughter to educators. I just was really thinking, especially taking classes with Farina of the complex nature of boarding schools and individual identity of people who I'd grown up around. And I just wanted to look at the impact of the schools on communities and how Native Nations and individuals undermine the intent of institutions to continue as people. And I have connections identity to their nations, and I love oral history work and talking to people and people being able to share their story, especially the historian, I rather talk to people who want to share their story, hear their perspective, than somebody who's not others those communities and doesn't have that experience. So, I'm very happy to be part of that work.”

Erin Dyke is an associate professor of curriculum studies at Oklahoma State University. She came to this project because she said it was important to teach about the truthtelling of boarding schools. 

“Though, I'm of white settler descent, through during my grad school at University of Minnesota, working under the mentorship of Mary Fong Hermes, who's dedicated her life and to Ojibwe language revitalization and culture revitalization. And so through her mentorship, and then also through learning from when I first moved and got my job at Oklahoma State University, learning from our amazing students in our program about the history and legacies and continuing impacts of schools on Indigenous education and education more broadly in Oklahoma, learning from amazing initiatives, indigenous led initiatives to ban land on reenactments in elementary school, and to refuse seller memory in and create more spaces to do that in school. So, I've been thinking about it through that lens. 

How do we and through collaborating with folks like Sarah and the Chilocco history project over the years, and then also through the work of some of our really amazing students, who I really appreciate being able to build more connections and networks through this grant project to one of the one example of some of The work that's being done is led by Rene Kemble, who is a vice chairwoman of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, who is also a doctoral student in curriculum studies at OSU, who has been working, is also a boarding schooler, graduated from Riverside Indian School, and has been working really diligently to open up spaces for conversation among boarding school, boarding schoolers in the Ponca Nation, most of whom attended Chilocco, and then to also make connections and create spaces where boarding schoolers could also work with and advise us and assist in teaching teachers about this history more complexly, and so we've been doing professional development work with the school discipline of teachers to kind of create and start to open up some of those spaces using the materials and the Chilocco history project.”

Asa (Ace) Samuels, Cheyenne and Arapaho of Oklahoma citizen, is a nontraditional, first-generation, Indigenous student at the University of Oklahoma who is dual majoring in biology and Native American Studies. Overcoming life’s obstacles, he aims to build a personal legacy that serves Native communities. Committed to fostering growth, he encourages Native youth to practice their language, dance, and ceremonies, and advocates for advancing education to prepare Indigenous people as leaders. 

“So, on the environmental track towards my I wouldn't necessarily call it a career, but it's my calling. I feel, you know, when you go into a work that you know, or go into a field that you're calling it's not, it's not work at all. You know, it's something that you're passionate about, and something that you want to do. So I feel it's something that's been called to me, but a lot of that has to do with, you know, boarding schools, you know.”

“There was something that started a long time ago, and it ran in through our communities, and it took us over, and it tried to assimilate us into these communities. Well, it assimilated us, but it did conquer us, because we're still here, right? We're still practicing our ways. We're still trying to learn. We have language, language revitalization, we have all these different things that are trying to do right now to ensure that our ways are carried on, and we have that next seven generation thinking, right? So based on, you know, my own experiences, you know, my grandpa and my aunt, you know, they all went to to the boarding schools and, you know, they didn't necessarily teach my mom, you know, the language or anything, because they figured that it was just best for her to be to learn the white place, right? So that way she wouldn't be discriminated against so much, that way it would be easy for her to work with society, right? So she wouldn't have to struggle with what we've struggled with today. And I'm talking about the education part, because we're always educated, continuously educated. That's why we're here today.”

Samuels is involved with a program called Mending Broken Hearts, a culturally grounded healing program developed by White Bison, Inc., designed to help Indigenous communities address unresolved grief and intergenerational trauma from historical events such as the forced removal of children to boarding schools, which led to the loss of language, culture, and family connections. 

“There's a lot of things that go on in the program, a lot of trauma, a lot of things that we have to deal with that I still struggle with. But, you know, it's, I think it's I think it makes sense, because we all, we all struggle with the same thing. One of the questions was, how can you forgive the unforgiveness? It's a very hard question, how do you forgive the unforgiven? And that's something that I struggle with, and that's part of being a facilitator, is to deal with that and try to get through it.”

Kelly Berry, an enrolled citizen of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, who has Choctaw relations, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Native American Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma where he also lectures. To Berry, Indian boarding school history is tied with his own family history. 

“Currently I am a postdoc fellow here slash lecturer in the neighborhood studies department to provide transparency on how I come into this work about boarding schools is that I am a descendant of two survivors of boarding schools. My great grandparents went to Carlisle, Chilocco, and Rainy Mountain school. I'm also on my Choctaw side. I have relations to their very first federal Indian boarding school, which is 1826 it's called Choctaw Academy, so very first one. And then also I have relations to another school in 1816 called the Foreign Mission School in Connecticut. They housed a couple of Choctaws of Osage students there, and that's kind of before the federal started. So kind of my background is that you have relations to those boarding schools. But also I've come at this boarding school discussion from a different perspective, different time period.”

“I'm also a high school certified principal, and knowing that in the classroom, the standards which people teach is that, and the textbook will tell you that the only Indian boarder schools are the federal Indian boarder schools from 1819, to about 19 60s. That's the only thing that the classes teach, is that students will come into my class and say, hey, yeah, I learned about boarding schools. Well, what year? About 1900 and so this all they learned with those boarding schools at that time period. But what those books don't tell you is that there were Indian schools in the 1500s and the 1600s and 1700s and they weren't called boarding schools at that time, they were called Indian schools, and they were located on the east coast of United States for the East Coast tribes, and some of those schools were similar to the federal need boarding schools. As far as assimilation, those students learn how to read and write English, they learn religion. But there are also ways that they were totally different from the Federal importing schools.”

Also on the team are Blaine McLain and Britton Morgan. Blaine McLain is the archivist of Special Collections and coordinator at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, which lies in the heart of the capital of Cherokee Nation, which established two seminaries in 1851 – a male and a female seminary. After the first female seminary burned, a second female seminary was built, which now stands on campus as Seminary Hall. McLain works with collections that include seminary materials from the Cherokee Nation and other historical artifacts from the region. Britton Morgan is a research assistant at NSU and a native of Muskogee, Oklahoma. Morgan works in the archives, focusing on materials related to boarding schools.

Michelle Martin, formerly on the faculty at Northeastern State University, served as the NSU point person for the project. She returned to Arizona as an independent scholar but continues to advise the NSU team and contribute to the project as a volunteer consultant.

Martin’s work is informed by her doctoral research on an interracial marriage connected to the Tallahassee Mission School for Muscogee children, run by Presbyterians in the 1870s. 

“I come to this work through my doctoral research that looked at an interracial marriage that was a product of the Tallahassee Mission School for Muskogee children run by the Presbyterians in the 1870s and my spouse actually is impacted by that trauma, the legacy of trauma from boarding schools. His great grandfather was sent to Chilocco when he was about 11 years old, and he had grandfather that was also sent to Chilocco when he was eight. And so that works its way through families, and you can see the impact of that.”

Cheyenne Widdecke is a master’s student in the anthropology program at the University of Oklahoma, with a focus on archaeology. She serves as the Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) for this grant, participating in an archival survey of the Western History Collection under the mentorship of Lina Ortega. 

Widdecke searches for materials related to boarding schools that have not previously been categorized in this way. She also contributes an archaeological component to the project, examining site records in Utah and Oklahoma to identify how boarding schools may be reflected there. Her thesis is an oral history project conducted in collaboration with the Sac and Fox Nation, centered on the Sac and Fox Mission School.

“I'm just checking to see any material related to boarding schools at the Western History Collections because it hasn't been categorized or searched in that way before. And then I also am doing, like, a little bit of an archeological portion to the grant where, in Utah and in Oklahoma, we're just trying to see how boarding schools are reflected in the site records, if they are at all, because they haven't been categorized that way before, either.”

Mary Harjo, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is a boarding school alumna who earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma. She attended boarding school from first through twelfth grade under federal government oversight, experiencing strict and often humiliating discipline, including hair cutting, kerosene and powder treatments, and enforced uniforms. While Harjo does not serve in an official capacity in this coalition, she advised those in attendance at the Aug. 26 meeting and shared her experiences in boarding school, recalling the physical and emotional hardships, including discrimination and prejudice, which shaped her resilience and identity.

“So and then, when I went to boarding school, I didn't want to go. My mother had cancer. My dad was really sick. My hair was down here, and they cut it up to here we had, we were doused with the kerosene we had white powder putting our hair. We had wear uniforms. So whenever we went to boarding, when we was at the boarding school, went to public school, that was another humiliating thing. We when we were in school, the people there made in front of us, they said, Oh, y'all look like boys. Y'all look like prisoners. You know, something that I feel like boarding school made me who I am today. Because even at the age of 13, I had a white social worker tell me I was never going to amount to anything. I was never I wouldn't even know the babies, my babies, fathers, and I had the opportunity see God is good. I met that lady when we were in the grocery store back at my hometown, and I pull out and went up to her, and I said, Do you remember me? And she goes, No, honey, who are you? I said, I'm that little Indian girl that you said would never amount to anything. And she was, I remember that I become a social worker just like her, and I even had the opportunity to tell her, but you don't have a bachelor's or a master's. I have the Bachelor of a master's degree in social work.”

This work is more important now than ever. There is ongoing debate about how history is understood and taught, and the experiences of Native Americans are foundational to the full story of American history. Supporting truthtelling and facing even the difficult truths is essential for a deeper understanding of the past and its impact today.