From the moment she stepped inside the National Archives in Washington, D.C., University of Minnesota Morris student Savana Hauck was overwhelmed with emotion.

“I genuinely looked around and welled up with tears, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘How is this my life?!’” she recalls.

Hauck, a fourth-year student from Minneapolis, was part of a small UMN Morris cohort — also including fellow student McKenna Potter and staff member Naomi Skulan — that traveled to the National Archives in May to find and copy archival records about the Morris Indian School, once housed where the UMN Morris campus stands today.

The American Indian boarding school in Morris was 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.

The archiving project is a partnership between the UMN Morris, 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.

Skulan, who is UMN Morris' metadata and technical services coordinator, was most intrigued by the handful of letters from American Indian students and parents in the collection. Most of the letters that have been scanned were written by administrators of the school or by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Letters from parents and students can be especially challenging to uncover, she says, as they often were not indexed with the other documents from the Morris school.

“These letters shed a very different light on the school compared to the letters by the superintendents,” Skulan says.

Together, Hauck, Potter and Skulan scanned more than 700 new items to be added to the UMN Morris Archives and shared with Tribal partners. Their trip was supported by the UMM Bert and Janet Ahern American Indian Studies Enhancement Fund.

 Over the course of the project, now in its fifth year, 15 UMN Morris student workers and interns have been involved with the transcription, organization and metadata creation for these archival records. Additionally, some UMN Morris students have worked on the project as part of their coursework, and several alumni have provided transcriptions during a weeklong “Alumni in the Archives” event each summer.

Overall, approximately 4,500 letters have been scanned and will be added to the UMN Morris Archives collection and shared with the White Earth Nation. When the project started, the Morris archives had just one box of materials on the Native American boarding school.

As a history major who is passionate about interpersonal relations and connecting with the past, Hauck was thrilled to have an opportunity to work in the National Archives.

“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,” Hauck says.

Potter describes the experience as “a dream come true.”

“History and the action of discovery have been such a keystone in my life and especially in my education,” says Potter, a fourth-year business and management major with a communication and media studies minor from Hugo, Minn. “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.”

Make a gift to support hands-on student experiences like Savana and McKenna's through the UMM Bert and Janet Ahern American Indian Studies Enhancement Fund.