Archaeologists have started digging for the remains of children who died at a Native American boarding school in Nebraska. Grave sites of dozens of children who died at the Genoa Indian industrial school have been lost for decades, a mystery that archaeologists aim to unravel as they dig in a field that a century ago was part of the sprawling campus.
Genoa was part of a national system of more than 400 Native American boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families and cut them off from their heritage.
Newspaper clippings, records and a student’s letter indicate at least 86 students died at the school, usually due to diseases such as tuberculosis and typhoid, while at least one death was blamed on an accidental shooting.
For decades, residents of the tiny community of Genoa, with help from Native Americans, researchers and state officials, have sought the location of a forgotten cemetery where the bodies of up to 80 students are believed to be buried.
Researchers identified the names of 49 of the children but have not been able to find names for 37. The bodies of some of those children were returned to their homes when they died, but others are believed to have been buried on the school grounds at a location long since forgotten.
The school, about 90 miles (145km) 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.
As part of an effort to find the cemetery, last summer dogs trained to detect the faint odour of decaying remains searched the area and signalled they had found a burial site in a narrow piece of land bordered by a farm field, railroad tracks and a canal.
A team using ground-penetrating radar last November also showed an area that was consistent with graves, but there would be no guarantees until researchers could dig into the ground, said Dave Williams, Nebraska’s state archeologist.
The process is expected to take several days.
“We’re going to take the soil down and first see if what’s showing up in the ground-penetrating radar are in fact grave-like features,” Williams said. “And once we get that figured out, taking the feature down and determining if there are any human remains still contained within that area.”
If the dig reveals human remains, the state archaeology office will continue to work with the Nebraska commission on Indian affairs in deciding what’s next. The remains could be reburied in the field and a memorial created, or exhumed and returned to tribes, Williams said.
DNA could indicate the region of the country each child was from but narrowing that to individual tribes would be challenging, Williams said.
The federal government is making a closer examination of the boarding school system. The US interior department, led by secretary Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary, released an initial report in 2022 and is working on a second report with additional details.
At least 500 children died at some of the schools, but that number is expected to reach into the thousands or tens of thousands as research continues.
Sunshine Thomas-Bear, a member of the Winnebago Tribe and its cultural preservation director, visited the archaeological site on Tuesday. She said her father was a Native American boarding school survivor, and that trauma from the institutions had rippled across generations.
“I want to help heal my people, let them know I’m watching. If anything’s found, then I will report back,” Thomas-Bear said. “It’s all a work in progress. This is one single step.”
English (US)