Records could begin moving out of the National Archives facility in San Bruno as early as next week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Wednesday. The day before, his state had filed a federal lawsuit to stop that. On Oct. 14, California sued the National Archives and Records Administration in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asking the court to halt a closure that the agency announced in late September with no tribal, state, or local consultation, CalMatters reported. The San Francisco-area archives and the Chicago National Archives are both slated to close at an unspecified date; NARA did not respond to requests for comment.
What sits in San Bruno is not abstract holdings. Tribal governments rely on the archives for Bureau of Indian Affairs records: enrollment files, land records and deeds, and documents from the federal Indian boarding school era. California is home to 109 federally recognized tribes. “Closing the National Archives at San Francisco … would irreparably harm California and its interests,” the lawsuit states, warning that transferring aged, fragile records would risk “damage and loss of the items altogether” and would, “at the very least,” make them inaccessible “for an unknown period of time, which could last years, during transit and processing.”
Consulations came only after the decision. Following the announced closures, NARA held two virtual sessions with tribes, on Oct. 13 and Oct. 15. Michael LaRonge, tribal historic preservation officer for the Sokaogon Chippewa Community, described them as structured more like a “listening session” than a consultation — an important first step, he said, but not a substitute for one. Attendees told reporters they felt the closure decisions were already final.
“I’m getting a lot of non-answers,” said Fallon Carey, a Cherokee Nation citizen and digital archives director for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, who attended the Oct. 15 session. “It feels a lot like lip service.” For communities working through the boarding school era, she said, the stakes are concrete: many survivors are elders who cannot wait years for records to resurface or afford to travel to wherever they land. “I have seen it with my own eyes, I’ve experienced it in my own life. Having access to these records can be deeply healing, having access to your own histories,” Carey said.
NARA did make one accommodation: bureau records will be moved last, according to LaRonge and Carey. LaRonge was unmoved. “[That’s] great if you work for a tribe who has funds to send people down there, but we don’t,” he said, rejecting the suggestion that tribes simply book reading-room appointments before the move. “It doesn’t feel like a good victory.” He said archive leaders also told attendees the bureau records are not a priority for digitization because they contain private information. “You have a responsibility to digitize these records – it’s part of your fiduciary responsibility to tribes under treaty law,” LaRonge said. “How many times do the tribes have to be told this isn’t a priority for us.”
The Chicago closure, unlike San Bruno’s, has drawn no state lawsuit — Illinois has no federally recognized tribes within its borders, so there was no state plaintiff with California’s standing. The Sokaogon Band sent a letter to Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office instead. “For Illinois, it feels like the tribes have been kind of left behind,” LaRonge said. Yet the Chicago facility holds documents from the former Green Bay Agency that may prove critical to the Brothertown Nation of Wisconsin, which is fighting to restore the federal recognition Congress terminated in 1839, Chairwoman Phylis Tousey told ICT. Both affected archives hold records that matters similarly for other terminated tribes seeking restoration and unrecognized tribes seeking recognition.
The lawsuit was filed the same day that major national Native advocacy organizations sent a letter to the former acting and current archivists of the United States condemning the closures. What the court does next — and whether it does it before the first boxes leave San Bruno — is now the operative question. There is no announced closure date, which is itself part of the complaint: the schedule is unknown to the communities with the most at stake in it.