40 Years Too Late: Investigating the History of Native American Boarding Schools with James Grant

Archival documents, oral history, and drones! Historian James Grant (Little Shell Chippewa) will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the approaches used, challenges faced, and lessons learned from a multidisciplinary investigation into the history of student deaths at three Native American boarding schools in Montana. The project, directed by an independent commission of scholars, relied on records collected throughout the United States, including the Ursuline Western Province Collection at The History Museum, to piece together this difficult history. Visit The History Museum Second Saturday, October 10 at 1pm for this insightful presentation. Kunz has saved 40 educational panels about the Holocaust produced by Simon Wiesenthal Center, brought to Montana by Bruce Barrett. The exhibition, titled The Courage to Remember, will be on display in the Ozark Club from September 15-25. The museum will be open Saturday, September 19 from 12pm-3pm. Pushing back naysayers, the group that first gathered on January 8, 1976, in the Great Falls home of Clara Heffern, transformed itself from what some viewed a small gaggle of community members interested in saving a historic stone building. They not only helped the efforts to save that building which now houses the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, but they have nurtured the Historical Society now housed in a forty-five thousand square-foot facility filled with historical exhibits, programming, and research opportunities. Join us Second Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 1:00pm in the Ozark Club event room when former executive director Cindy Kittredge will share her observations of how a community waved its wand again and again to make the invisible visible.