Trish Ahmed and Charlie Neibergall Associated Press
GENOA, Neb. — In a remote patch of a long-closed Native boarding school, near a canal and some railroad tracks, Nebraska’s state archeologist and two teammates filled buckets with dirt and sifted through it as if they were searching for gold.
They're trying to find the dozens of children who died at the school and have been lost for decades, a mystery that archeologists aim to unravel as they dig in a central Nebraska field that was part of the sprawling campus a century ago.
People toting shovels, trowels and even smaller tools are searching the unmarked site where ground-penetrating radar suggested a possible location for the cemetery of the Genoa Indian Industrial School.
Genoa was part of a national system of more than 400 Native American boarding schools that attempted to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture by separating children from their families and cutting them off from their heritage. And the discovery of more than 200 children’s remains buried at the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the U.S. since 2021.
“For all those families with students who died here in Genoa and weren't returned home — and that information being lost for over 90 years now — it creates this perpetual cycle of trauma,” Dave Williams, the state archeologist, said Monday.
Williams added, “Finding the location of the cemetery, and the burials contained within, will be a small step towards bringing some peace and comfort" to tribes after a long period of uncertainty where children were sent to boarding schools and never came home.
The school, about 90 miles west of Omaha, opened in 1884 and at its height was home to nearly 600 students from more than 40 tribes across the country. It closed in 1931 and most buildings were long ago demolished.
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|March 08, 2023