University of Iowa Professor to Return Documents to Survivors of Native American Boarding Schools

Details

By Isobel Perez, The Daily Iowan

September 15, 2025

In the dimly lit rooms of the National Archives, Joe Maxwell recalled digging through what he described as “the bowels” of the U.S. government as he and other student research assistants sifted through boxes full of paperwork as a part of Project Return, a nationwide project set to launch officially in October.

The project’s goal is to return documents to the survivors of Native American boarding schools who were taken from their families and attended abusive classrooms. 

[Editor's Note: This article was first publihsed by "The Daily Iowan." Used with permission. All rights reserved.]

These residential schools, which were located across the U.S., Canada, and more than 526 of which were federally funded, according to The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, were often the site of abduction, acculturation, abuse, and death, with the U.S. Department of the Interior reporting at least 973 children died while attending these schools. 

Many people who survived were unaware documents from their time in the schools even existed. Report cards, photographs, and letters sent to and from the families of the children remained unreturned. 

“Most Indian boarding school survivors that I’ve ever met were not aware that there were records in the National Archives,” Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz said, the director of the Native Policy Lab and a UI associate professor of practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs. 

Schuettpelz was recently awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to fund Project Return in July. 

“Part of the reason that I do this is that they don’t know they exist, and the process for getting them is not straightforward,” she said. 

As a part of the pilot for Project Return, the program partnered with the Chickasaw Nation, which provided Schuettpelz and the student research assistants with a list of student records they were interested in having repatriated and returned to their rightful owners. 

In October, the program will officially launch a national portal that will allow survivors of Native American boarding schools to request to have their records returned free of charge. The project will eventually expand to return records to families and tribes of the boarding school survivors who have passed. 

“Those records would answer a lot of people’s questions because not all of these kids came home, and sometimes families have been wondering what happened to their child,” Johnathan  Buffalo, the historical preservation director of the Meskwaki Cultural Center & Museum in Tama, Iowa, said. “Even after the original parents and grandparents died, they’re still wondering, ‘What happened? Where is my child?’”

The Meskwaki, also known as the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, adamantly resisted boarding schools in Iowa, even going to court in December 1899 after a Meskwaki girl named Lelah-puc-ka-chee ran away from the Indian Training School at Toledo that had opened in the late 1890s near the nation. 

RELATED: University of Iowa professor explores Native American identity in new book

UI Professor of History and American Studies Stephen Warren said the case was just one of many examples of Native children resisting residential schools by running away, defending classmates who were facing abuse, and refusing to follow rules set by the institutions.

“The kids themselves just refused to be dominated by missionaries through small acts of resistance,” Warren said.

By the end of the 1899 court case, a judge of the court case ruled students, such as Lelah-puc-ka-chee, could not be forced to attend the boarding schools, leading to a depopulation of the Toledo school, and by 1911, the school had closed. 

While the case became a victory for the Meskwaki, in the long run, it did little to stop the abduction of Native children from their families, both in Iowa and across the country, according to an interview Buffalo conducted with Native News Online and Judge John R. Caldwell’s 1910 history of Tama County.

“We won the battle, but in a sort of way, we lost the war,” Buffalo said. “Because after that, the government learned that you have to send kids far away. If you send them to a boarding school right next to their families, they’ll keep escaping.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, Buffalo said the children were sent to schools in neighboring states, the effect of which destroyed generations culturally and spiritually. And while the events of the past cannot be changed, Buffalo said the only way to move forward is by acknowledging both the positive and negative parts of U.S. history, which Maxwell said is one reason why Project Return is important.

“The lives of the people who lived in the past are still with us, and it’s important as we, as a society, move into the future together to have as complete of an understanding as possible of the people who came before,” Maxwell said. 

Schuettpelz said she hopes by returning documents, Native Nations across the country can be helped. 

“It’s a very small thing to return their records, but hopefully it’s something that provides them with some amount of closure or peace,” Schuettpelz said.