Instead of transferring them to Boston Jesuits, the Catholic nuns want to ‘take steps in truth-telling’ and ‘bring some healing’ to descendants
In a significant turn of events, an array of Catholic Ursuline Boarding School documents related to the boarding school students of several Indigenous nations in Montana and Alaska will remain in Montana.
Several U-Hauls loaded with every day records, photos, ledgers, scrapbooks and other archives were originally slated to transfer to the Catholic Jesuits in Boston, Massachusetts.
Instead, The History Museum in Great Falls, Montana, successfully secured the keeping of thousands of Ursuline Academy Boarding and Day School records to the Cascade County Historical Society repository. The community building is known as the Ursuline Center now.
Records include vital historical documents of the Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Nakoda, Assiniboine, Salish, Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille people, plus non-Natives who attended the Ursuline schools.