The National Archives and Records Administration plans to close its archives and records center in Chicago.
Some tribal nation leaders around and from the region — including historic Ohio tribes — worry how this could affect access to their history.
Consolidating space
This facility holds federal and court records for the states of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio, according to the National Archives administration.
That includes documents ranging from treaties, government-to-government records, boarding school enrollment forms and more. The regional facilities are open and accessible to the public.
The Midwest facility isn’t the only one planned for closure — the administration also plans to close its archives and records center in San Francisco/San Bruno, as well as the federal records center in Seattle.
The National Archives and Records Administration didn’t respond to WYSO’s requests for comment.
In an earlier statement, the agency said: “These closures address the growing volume of underutilized space resulting from the federal government's transition to electronic recordkeeping ... In addition, these facilities, which are over 50 years old, possess aging infrastructure requiring significant upgrades that are fiscally unviable for the agency.”
Most records will be moved to Kansas City, the administration said. But it’s unclear where some of the other archives and records from Chicago will be moved.
The agency held tribal partner listening sessions to address questions and concerns on the closures earlier this month.
While several tribal nations negotiated treaties to keep reservation land in Midwestern states as the U.S. expanded westward in the 18th and 19th centuries, many other tribal nations in these regions were displaced or separated from their homes.
“That's one of the hurdles and obstacles that a lot of tribes face, is our documents are kind of scattered around the country depending on what the document is, what it pertains to and then what time frame, you know, if it accompanied us during removal,” said Raphael Wahwassuck, a tribal council member for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas.
Ways tribes have relied on archives
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas has documented ties to the Great Lakes region.
Wahwassuck also serves as tribal historic preservation officer for the nation. These officials are responsible for protecting tribal heritage through preservation of sites, resources, and written and/or oral traditions. Seven federally recognized Potawatomi nations exist in the U.S. — five of them are based in the Midwest.
Archives from the Chicago facility helped the tribe reclaim some of their unceded land in Illinois, he said, so they know the importance.
“Some tribes may not have the resources to travel to look at the physical documents after the move,” Wahwassuck said. “Having it located there in Chicago is good because there's a number of tribes that are only a couple hours away from the site.”
While the nation is based in Kansas now, he said there’s evidence that some of their citizens returned to Illinois or Wisconsin. They also use the archives to track objects of cultural patrimony, which are items belonging to the tribe that are required to be returned through a federal law known as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA.
For example, Wahwassuck said they rely on these records to trace their tribal citizens’ financial accounts that were managed by federal Indian agents in the 1800s.
Some citizens made transactions with store owners using their own cultural belongings to charge items on credit until they could pay with money.
“A lot of times, those items were never returned to the individuals or families who used them in those situations," Wahwassuck said. "And that's kind of where the NAGPRA treasure hunt starts, is to try to trace back and see, ‘Well, who was in which communities, what kind of business were they doing, and then who they had outside business with. Did they interact with other universities or did they with other Indian agents across the nation?’”
Heather Miller works as the NAGPRA coordinator for the Wyandotte Nation. Now headquartered in Oklahoma, the Wyandot(te) was the last tribe forcibly removed from Ohio.
Miller said she’s referred to the archives for identifying the removal route of the Wyandot people from Ohio, and finding where their children were sent to boarding schools.
“That is so critical to all of the work that we do, and to ensuring that we do have the correct information or the right way to talk about pieces of our history and our relationships with other communities and other entities, it's through (this) archival material,” she said.
Questions around the process
Experts within the archives and research communities also have sounded an alarm.
“Despite NARA’s tremendous progress in digitizing analog records, veterans, government officials at all levels, students, historians and the general public continue to rely on the physical materials only accessible at the National Archives Regional Archives facilities,” said the nonprofit National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators in a statement.
The Kansas City facility already houses records from seven other states, and it's also accepting records from facilities in New York City and College Park, Maryland.
This raises concerns for the time it might take to find archival documents. Wahwassuck recounted a time that himself and a group of tribal historians spent two full days trying to locate a single record.
“We were in there gathering information from the record and just barely touched the tip of the iceberg, if you will, about all the information that was stored just in the one record, and there's thousands of records there,” he said.
Wahwassuck said they’re just "filling in the blanks" on the administration’s plans for how they’re going to go about the closures.
“We don't know what the method of transport that they're thinking about, you know how they're going to secure everything, what record and filing system that's going to be utilized to help with the move. We don't have a set time frame or any of that information that an appropriate consultation would allow us.”
Miller also named their transition to electronic record keeping as a reason for concern.
“We keep thinking, you know, worst case scenario, a giant paper shredder is going to be brought in before they close the doors. And that's the last thing that we would ever want to see,” Miller said.
