Story at a glance
- The boarding school’s aim was to educate and culturally assimilate Native American children into American society, often through harsh discipline, abuse and exploitation.
- The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project recently announced that 102 students who died while at the school have been identified.
- The recently identified names won’t be released until there’s a consultation with tribal leaders.
More than 100 Native American students who died while attending a federally operated boarding school in Nebraska in the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been identified by researchers, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
The Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School operated from 1884 to 1934 and was one of the largest boarding schools for Native Americans in the country.
The boarding school’s aim was to educate and culturally assimilate Native American children into American society, often through harsh discipline, abuse and exploitation. Children were forcibly removed from their tribes and families against their will, forbidden from speaking their native languages and forced to convert to Christianity.
Researchers behind the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, a collaborative effort working to tell the stories of the Native American children who attended Genoa, recently announced 102 students who died while at the school have been identified.
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Researchers identified the children by searching through newspaper archives, including the school’s student newspapers, Margaret Jacobs, co-director of the project, told the Omaha World-Herald.
Many of the deaths were the result of diseases such as tuberculosis that spread quickly throughout the overcrowded school. Death was so common at such facilities that cemeteries were a standard feature.
Ground-penetrating radar has been used in recent weeks in search of the school’s cemetery, but researchers have come up empty.
“These children died at the school; they didn’t get a chance to go home,” Jacobs told the news outlet. “I think that the descendants deserve to know what happened to their ancestors.”
The recently identified names won’t be released until there’s a consultation with tribal leaders.
The news comes after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, earlier this year launched an investigation into the lasting effects of the boarding schools in the U.S.
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