What is NIBSDA?
NIBSDAÂ was conceptualized to serve as a national digital platform and digital repository for boarding school archival collections throughout the United States.
As part of truth-telling, access to boarding school records for survivors and descendants is paramount 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 towards restored Indigenous cultural sovereignty.
“Sharing our experiences relieves the emotional isolation many trauma survivors experience."
-Sandy White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), NABS Elder-in-Residence
"We believe that increasing access to all of these records is a crucial foundation for raising society's awareness of these issues and ultimately leading a national movement towards truth, justice, and healing."
-Deborah Parker (Tulalip), NABS CEO
What Does NIBSDA Do?
- It serves as a presentation platform for the records and collections that NABS digitizes in-house from a variety of national repositories who have boarding school relevant material;Â
- It serves as a centralized hub in the form of an aggregator that will pull in a variety of existing digital collections or digital projects from partner institutions that have or feature boarding school relevant material.
