Work is underway on a research project that promises to make it easier to access the historical records of a Native American residential boarding school that once operated in Bismarck.
In early January, a group of researchers spent two days at the National Archives in Kansas City, Missouri, digitizing papers and records from Bismarck Indian School. It was the second trip they made for the project.
Prairie Rose Seminole is the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation projects coordinator. She says the Bismarck Indian School collection has many thousands of documents, and it could take several years to digitize the collection.
"That pathway from taking all these files into a finished archive that would be available to the public? We're not there yet. There's still a lot of pieces that we're putting together, and it'll take several more trips for us to actually digitize all of the files."
Until now, the holdings have been accessible only by traveling hundreds of miles to Kansas City and scheduling time to search through numerous boxes and folders. This multi-phase project hopes to digitize and make the documents available electronically.
Seminole says the collection has documents that are historically significant for the Bismarck/ Mandan area in general, but it is especially important for the descendants of the boarding school students who will get to see their history, maybe for the first time.
"For the native students and for our native communities, it would just provide so much healing and closer in a gap of history that was omitted from our narrative here in North Dakota. For us, those are pieces that are just like gems; they honestly are priceless."