Stolen Spirits
Digging up the dark past of Native Americans oppression
On the frozen plains of Nebraska, a community is digging up its past. Archaeologists are trying to locate a cemetery of Native American children who died while attending the Genoa US Indian Industrial School.
The Genoa school was one of a network of institutions for Native American children set up in the 19th and 20th centuries across the USA. Their purpose was to assimilate indigenous children into the white man’s world. ‘These were not schools. It was a prison camp, a work camp’, says Judi Gaiashkibos. By 1926, it’s estimated more than 80 per cent of Native American children were enrolled in these institutions. Last year, the discovery of more than a thousand graves of children at the sites of former boarding schools in Canada pushed the USA to examine its own history. ‘I don’t like calling these things gravesites or cemeteries. I call them crime scenes’, says Redwing Thomas. ‘I can’t rest until I’ve exhausted every possible avenue to find the children’, says Judy.
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