Increasing Access to American Indian Off-Reservation Boarding School Archives

Abstract

The Sherman Indian Museum’s rich collection documents the student experience, institutional culture, and community history of one of the oldest off-reservation American Indian boarding schools in the United States still in operation. Efforts to better understand the complex and layered history of these schools are regularly confronted with limited and scattered histories where significant gaps in the narrative exist. This paper details the cross-institutional collaboration to process and digitize the museum’s collection for increased accessibility, focusing on the partnership formed between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous institution and the steps taken to create one of the premier online digital collections documenting the boarding school experience.