Musings of a NARA Researcher: Getting the Job
In late July 2022, I received an e-mail from friend and colleague, Stephen Curley, Director of Archives for the National Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen several years ago much in part due to my participation in the Native American Archives Section (NAAS) of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). He was reaching out to me to see if I had any Tribal contacts that could support NABS’ work in identifying boarding school archival records to digitize that are relevant to Tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest. In response, I sent my recommendations and contact lists to him and wished him luck.
Shortly thereafter, in September, Stephen sent me a follow-up e-mail asking if Chickaloon Village Traditional Council (CVTC), the Tribe I currently work for, and I would be interested in serving as the contractor to do the actual digitization for NABS at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Seattle office. As their project closely aligns with the work our Culture and Historic Preservation Department are already doing, it seemed like a unique opportunity for the Tribe to partner on a project that not only benefits multiple Indigenous communities, thus supporting their brother and sisters to learn and heal from boarding school traumas, but also supports the Tribe’s goal of identifying repositories that hold Ahtna cultural materials and establishing relationships with those repositories.
After some conversation, my Department Director and our Tribal Executive Director both agreed to CVTC accepting the invitation. In the end, it was decided that our Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Angela (Angie) Wade, and I would serve as the two CVTC staff that would travel to Seattle for a six-week stay from October 30th through December 10th, to digitize records from the Chemawa, Cushman and Mt.Edgecombe boarding schools that NABS had identified that are permanently housed at NARA. The work, was funded through a Council on Library Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Collections grant that NABS was awarded.
The next series of blog posts will be based on Angie’s and my experience during our Seattle trip that I hope will provide some insight to both how a large-scale remote digitization project actually plays out in practice (versus conception) and exactly what the researcher experience is like at the NARA Seattle location. A location, I might add, that has been on the OMB’s chopping block for several years now and remains in a state of precarious funding and support.
