Sokaogon Chippewa Community News

Search Begins for Sokaogon Children Taken During the Federal Indian Boarding School Era

Posted on: May 16, 2024
By Michael LaRonge, SCC Tribal Historic Preservation Officer

As a result of the 2021 Federal Indian Boarding School Report, Tribes have been left with the difficult task of finding student information for the schools named in the report.

The Sokaogon THPO office has been discussing the need for identifying repositories for these student lists and organizing a group effort to digitize and share the materials with those represented in the documents. Marquette University in Milwaukee holds the records for the Catholic-run Federal Boarding Schools for a number of states, including Wisconsin.

With the assistance of Amy Cary, the Head of Collections at the Marquette University Archives, Cultural Committee member Ryan Randall, Recreation Center staffer Chris Stager and myself, we digitized records from the Catholic Indian Boarding Schools in Wisconsin in two work days.
The Archive has already created digital files for three of the seven boxes of records for the Wisconsin schools, which they have already shared. The remaining four boxes from the Wisconsin schools contained 4,211 pages of information, although some documents were more than a single page. The group was also able to begin work on one of the Michigan schools, completing scans for two out of eight folders, totaling 582 pages.

These documents will not be available for public review until the final image editing is finished, per our agreement with the University Archive staff. Once done, the THPO will begin working with Tribal Administration and the Cultural Committee to identify Sokaogon Members on the student enrollment lists.

Since multiple Tribes are found on most of the records, the files will also be shared with the other Wisconsin THPOs who are also working on their own Federal Boarding School data projects. They will, in turn, share appropriate information with the Sokaogon THPO office.

The process of identifying those taken and whether they returned home, or if a search for their final resting place is required, will take some time, but the process is underway.