Ok, I had a full post submitted here but I removed it because as I dig into this more, I realized that I had a serious misunderstanding of how dockers work with the Discourse install. My previous post would have confused people because, basically I didn’t know what I was talking about. 
I was adding the import files manually to /var/discourse/ directory when I should have been looking for them within the docker. A clear mistake looking back at it, but I was pretty confused at the time. That could be more clear in the instructions, but I managed to figured that out and solve my own problem.