For the past five years, researchers and students from the University of Minnesota Morris have spent time each summer in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., working to find and copy archival records about the Morris Indian School.
The UMN Morris campus was the location of an American Indian boarding school established in 1887 by the Sisters of Mercy community of the Catholic Church under contract with the U.S. government. The U.S. government began directly operating the Morris Industrial School for Indians on the site in 1897. The federal government closed the school in 1909.
Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies Kevin Whalen leads the project in a partnership between UMN Morris, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Niibi Center, a White Earth-based nonprofit supporting Tribal people in sharing and processing stories around boarding schools, forced removal, land loss and other historical traumas.
In May of 2026, two UMN Morris students, Savana Hauck ’27, Minneapolis, and McKenna Potter ‘27, Hugo, along with UMN Morris' metadata and technical services coordinator, Naomi Skulan, scanned more than 700 new items to be added to the UMN Morris Archives and shared with Tribal partners.
As a history major who is very passionate about interpersonal relations and connecting with the past, Hauck was thrilled to work in the National Archives.
“The first day we walked into the research room in D.C., I genuinely looked around and welled up with tears and I remember thinking to myself, ‘how is this my life?!’ Over the course of four days we got to know the people who make the gears turn in that building, scan hundreds of documents to bring back to Morris for future transcription, and feel like what we were doing was important.”
For Potter, getting to go to the National Archives “was a dream come true. [H]istory and the action of discovery have been such a keystone in my life and especially in my education. I am so so grateful to have been given the opportunity… This experience has left such a beautiful impression on what my future could hold.” A business and management major with a communication and media studies minor, McKenna hopes to pursue a masters of library science degree after Morris.
Over the course of the project, 15 UMN Morris student workers and interns have been involved with the transcription, organization and metadata creation for these archival records. Additionally, students in Whalen’s classes have worked on the project as part of their coursework. And several alumni have provided transcriptions during the week-long “Alumni in the Archives” event every summer.
This work has significantly increased the amount of archival information relating to the Morris Indian School—when the project started, the Archives had one box of materials on the Native American boarding schools.
Overall, approximately 4,500 letters have been scanned and will be added to the Archives collection and shared with White Earth Nation.
Many of these materials remain unprocessed, as processing each batch of letters takes a significant amount of time and work. Skulan reports that work is just wrapping up on the batch of letters obtained in the first year's trips to the National Archives.
Skulan is most interested in the handful of letters from students and parents. Most of the letters that have been scanned were written by the administrators of the school or by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Letters from parents and students can be especially challenging to uncover, as they often were not indexed with the other documents from the Morris schools.
“These letters shed a very different light on the school compared to the letters by the superintendents.”