Archive Accessibility
and Research
Increasing access to our historic records is essential for accountability. The archival materials for Holy Rosary Mission and Red Cloud are currently held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can visit the website for those archives here.
We are currently working with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) and the Marquette Archives to establish a plan for digitizing all of our records.
Essential to confronting the history of Holy Rosary Mission boarding school is also archival research into the lived reality of the boarding school, especially in the first five decades of its existence. We are in the process of expanding our staff to include a full time researcher who will delve into the archives to uncover the realities of language suppression, violence, sexual abuse, forced attendance, and deaths and burials at the school. We hope this research will help determine what was true about Holy Rosary and Our Lady of Lourdes that is similar to the common boarding school narratives and what is perhaps different.
We are currently recording and collecting oral histories of people who boarded at Holy Rosary and Our Lady of Lourdes. These stories will be collected and shared or made available in whatever way the boarder would feel comfortable.