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Preserving Indian Trust Records: American Indian Records Repository
Deep under the grassy hills of Lenexa, Kansas, not far from Haskell Indian Nations University, Interior employees, contractors, and staff from the National Archives Records Administration are working together to preserve Indian Affairs records. Each morning, these employees drive down a hill and into the gaping mouth of a limestone cave to get to work at the American Indian Records Repository (AIRR). The walls of their workspace are craggy, bumpy limestone, painted white. There, boxes upon boxes of records are stored in strict compliance with National Archives Records Administration (NARA) standards, on shelving stacked 14 levels high, the length and width of a football field.
Today, more than 170,000 indexed boxes, with over 400 million pages of records, are stored at AIRR. These records—from as far back as the 1700s—include historic trust, education, and other historic Indian Affairs records from locations all over the nation.
AIRR provides secure access to records for research by individual Indians, tribes, and historians, with permission from Interior, and for Interior staff conducting the historical accounting of Indian trust records.
- For more than 100 years, miners worked under the rolling hills of Kansas chipping out limestone for uses such as construction and road-building. In the 1950s, workers began to mine limestone with the aim of leaving behind useable subterranean space.
- There is an estimated 20 million square feet of business and industrial space underground in the greater Kansas City area. This is about 10% of the business space in the area.
- The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has 1.3 million cubic square feet of storage space available for federal records underground in Lenexa.
- The American Indian Records Repository (AIRR) is a product of a partnership between NARA and the Department of the Interior. This is the first such partnership in history.
- AIRR meets the National Archives’ 2009 standards for records storage and is on par with NARA College Park facility in Maryland—the best archival facility in the world.
- AIRR contains retired Indian Affairs records from BIA agencies and OST offices all over the nation, and includes school records, trust records, old maps, and more.
- The air inside the AIRR is filtered repeatedly for airborne particulates, dust, and filaments.
- No ink pens, gum, candy, food, or liquids are allowed in any of the research areas or storage areas at AIRR.
- Staff members at AIRR help teach courses on records management at nearby Haskell Indian Nations University.
Today: The facility continues to receive boxes at the Annex (where they are indexed) from BIA agencies in the field as the agencies clear out their backlog of inactive records, and as active records become inactive. The only Indian records that are not stored at AIRR are those that have become legal property of the National Archives and Records Administration, and will remain at National Archives facilities around the nation, and active records at Interior offices.
- Approximately 1,000 boxes of inactive Indian records are delivered to AIRR each month.
- Staff has indexed and deposited more than 170,000 boxes of Indian Affairs records at the AIRR.
- Each standard records center box holds one cubic foot of material; one cubic foot holds approximately 2,000 sheets of paper.
- AIRR is currently storing boxes in two NARA archival quality “storage bays” that measure approximately 125,000 cubic feet each.
- AIRR has leased two more “bays” from NARA. Staff is currently conducting historical accounting processes in these bays.
- More than 125 contractorsand Interior staff members work at AIRR.
- AIRR is about 80 to 90 feet underground.
- AIRR cost approximately $2 million to build—a cost that includes the office space, research space, and NARA archival storage “bays.” This cost is significantly lower than it would have been for an above-ground storage center.
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