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in the united states midwest a harrowing
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search is underway
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to locate the graves of native american
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children taken from their tribes and
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sent to boarding schools
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these were not schools
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it was a prison camp
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from as far back as i can remember i've
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heard this story you know my mom would
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say she's still lost somewhere
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the recent discovery in canada of more
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than a thousand graves at former
00:00:41
boarding schools exposed the
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state-sanctioned abuse of indigenous
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children
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the blueprint for these schools came
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from across the border in the united
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states now native american tribes in the
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u.s are demanding justice for the forced
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removal of their children and a bigger
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untold story is emerging a landmark
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federal government report now estimates
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tens of thousands of indigenous children
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could have died at us institutions
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i don't like calling these uh these
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things grave sites or cemeteries i don't
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call them that call them crime scenes
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that's what i call them
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in this report
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foreign correspondent gains exclusive
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access to one community
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as it begins a journey to uncover the
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truth
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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wakata
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on a cold winter's morning these native
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american children are having a lesson in
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language okay that's your format are you
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ready here we go
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sapa black
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the language
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is literally the heart and soul of our
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people it holds our identity and it
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holds our our practices our beliefs our
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philosophies our world views
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all inside the language so our existence
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is directly tied to it there was the
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weed
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red wing thomas is one of a few who can
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speak dakota
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his tribe's language practice this word
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with me saying
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less than
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5 of my people we don't know our
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language
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we are on the verge of reclaiming it but
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it's an uphill walk you know and we have
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a long way to go it took generations to
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wipe the language out it's going to take
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generations to restore it
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she ignored him
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he blames the us government's boarding
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school policy for destroying his
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people's culture
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as native people we've been severed from
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our language from our culture from our
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practices
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over a whole course of time but the
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boarding school era in the course of
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history did a number on our people where
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we almost
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did not recuperate from it
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from 1819 to 1969
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hundreds of thousands of indigenous
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children were taken from their tribes
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and placed in state and church-run
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boarding schools across the u.s and its
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then territories
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the schools under the guise of education
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were a dark experiment in assimilation
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the model for the schools was devised by
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military officer richard henry pratt
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an indian hunter
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[Music]
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by stripping away culture
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pratt believed he could kill the indian
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and save the man
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when you have a motto kill the engine
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save the man i mean come on that says
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this is as genocidal as it gets
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the schools were created for one purpose
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only and that was to destroy our belief
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system to destroy our family system
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and to
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change our identity
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by 1926 83
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of native american children were
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enrolled in these institutions
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everyone in this room literally descends
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from a boarding school survivor i mean
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that's just the truth
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redwing's grandfather albert was sent to
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boarding school at the age of eight
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he attended one of the largest and
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longest running institutions
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the genoa u.s indian industrial school
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in nebraska
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he never really talked about it
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and it wouldn't be until later
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you know later in his life where stories
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would be shared
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one experience shared that a soiled
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sheep
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would be used to be wiped in the mouths
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of the other children who spoke their
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language
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you know and if they didn't want those
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dirty sheets and soiled sheets shoved
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into their mouth well then you stop
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speaking your language and start
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speaking english
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that's pretty hateful you know that
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that's that's pretty evil
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[Music]
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this entrance
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and a few buildings and barns are all
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that remain of the indian industrial
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school in genoa
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once a sprawling campus housing children
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from more than 40 tribes
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today it's a place where people come to
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learn the history of what happened here
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[Music]
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this building once the school's workshop
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is now a museum run by the genoa
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foundation
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a group of local volunteers
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hi nancy
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it's so good to see you
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[Music]
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judy gashkabash's mother eleanor went to
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school here
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i'll let you look at your mom's window
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that was donated in her honor
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like many survivors her mother didn't
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talk about her time at boarding school
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she would talk about it and there was
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sort of a
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haunting look or a sadness to the tone
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of her voice
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she tried to tell the good things it
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says my mother's name there but i don't
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know
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i don't have a lot of pictures of my
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mother because for one thing they made
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them be photographed for everything and
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my mother detested having her picture
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taken
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so i look at that photo they have and i
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say one of those girls is my mother
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my mother cooked and baked breads and
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rolls and food that the children ate
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however most of the time they went a bit
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hungry
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[Music]
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to try to learn more judy began
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attending the school's reunions
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i started going to the genoa indian
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school reunions after my mother died so
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i got to learn about what it was like
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and meet people that could have been at
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school with my mother
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the genoa foundation's secretary nancy
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carlson started the annual gatherings
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more than 30 years ago
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former students were coming back asking
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information about the school and saying
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they wanted reunions and this sort of
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thing and so we thought you know what
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these people have this real need let's
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try to help them and do that three good
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super i got you this reunion was the
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first
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filmed in 1990 these pictures have never
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been broadcast
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first year i came i stayed two years
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as the school has no living survivors
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they offer a rare glimpse into what life
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was like for some former students
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so what was it what was your day like
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what time did you have to get up and i
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had to get up at four o'clock in the
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morning
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you never got any other time off to make
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up for it what did you learn here
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well i guess i i don't know i learned to
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i'm not really sure i guess i learned
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how to get along you know with other
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people you know strangers being around
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strangers here too
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this was just like a military school we
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had to march everywhere when it comes to
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dinner we went to march for church
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remarks
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[Music]
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these were not schools
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it was a prison camp
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a work camp
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it wasn't a
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lovely place to learn your education
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they were little soldiers
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[Music]
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every morning you know the whistles blew
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you had to get out of bed
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there was nothing of home
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you were stripped of all your cultural
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belongings
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your hair which is so sacred for the
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boys it was all cut off
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it was a self-sufficient school so the
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children were used as labor
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you learned the three r's half the day
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but it was a very watered down
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curriculum it wasn't stimulating it
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wasn't
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with the goal that you could be anything
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dreams could come true at the genoa
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indian school for these children no the
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dream was you will be a servant
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many students left the school with their
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culture broken
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others didn't return home at all
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[Music]
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what is important about where we're
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standing now as far as you know
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only that
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it's where we think the cemetery is
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the only reason
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why why would there be a
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cemetery with the school
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well
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kids started dying at an early age i
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mean at the
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early time they were at the school they
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had to do something with them
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i don't think it was possible those days
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to send them home the bodies i mean
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so they buried them here
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james nash attended the school in the
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late 1920s
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at the reunion he revealed two of his
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classmates died at the school
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he believes their deaths were covered up
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i searched the archives in washington dc
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for a week
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and i never found any record whatsoever
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of these two deaths
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that i personally knew about
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why do you think that is
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i think probably the
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whoever was
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operating the general indian school
00:12:00
had those records destroyed because they
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were derogatory to the
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their image
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he took some of the people from the
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foundation board or some of the guys and
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they went out and they looked where he
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thought it was but they couldn't find
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any
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any markers or anything there the next
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day they had like a
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a grater that came in and just removed
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the topsoil to see if they could find
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where their graves and they did not find
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anything
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and so it was because of that they
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didn't find anything that they decided
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we were going to do this
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set up a marker that's just east to the
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east of this building to honor those
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former students that die
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[Music]
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the remains of
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215 children some as young as three
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buried for decades on the ground more
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unmarked graves uncovered at another
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catholic residential school
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last year in canada the discovery of
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mass graves at the sites of former
00:13:05
boarding schools shocked the world
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but with more than double the number of
00:13:10
schools in the us the government says
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tens of thousands of indigenous children
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could have suffered the same fate
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at no time in history have the records
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or documentation of this policy been
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compiled or analyzed to determine the
00:13:25
full scope of its reaches and effects
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we must uncover the truth about the loss
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of human life and the lasting
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consequences of these schools
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[Music]
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a historic federal investigation into
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america's own boarding school era is now
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underway
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in nebraska's capital lincoln judy
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gashkebash heads up the state's
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commission on indian affairs
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she says it's time to tell the truth
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about what happened at her mother's
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school
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when we first heard about
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what was going on in canada i said we've
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got to focus on
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the children that died here
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a cemetery at a school is not the norm
00:14:12
that you could die at school and then
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you're going to be buried out the door
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this whole history is almost invisible
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people aren't aware of the fact that
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we're going to find these kind of graves
00:14:26
we're going to find missing children
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here in the united states too
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judy asked historian dr margaret jacobs
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to find out how many children died at
00:14:39
genoa
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[Music]
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when i started trying to find out what
00:14:47
happened to the children who died the
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first place i looked was the government
00:14:50
records
00:14:50
[Music]
00:14:53
nothing
00:14:54
so that's when i started doing some
00:14:56
newspaper searches
00:14:58
she soon began uncovering reports of
00:15:01
students deaths
00:15:03
spinal paralysis
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heart failure
00:15:08
there's a lot of accidental deaths we've
00:15:11
come across a drowning
00:15:13
a child who was hit by a train
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their diseases were sweeping through
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these schools
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but in many cases they weren't returning
00:15:22
the children to their homes when they
00:15:24
died and they were burying them on site
00:15:28
and
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it's just kind of chilling to me
00:15:32
you know to think that
00:15:34
first for so many children the schools
00:15:36
were death traps
00:15:38
[Music]
00:15:43
those who grew up in genoa knew and
00:15:46
understood what happened here it was a
00:15:48
point that we were taught in school
00:15:49
about
00:15:50
native american boarding schools
00:15:52
assimilation but we weren't aware of the
00:15:55
cemetery at least i know
00:15:58
myself i didn't stop to think about the
00:16:00
students that died here what happened to
00:16:02
them
00:16:03
nikki drewes volunteers with the genoa
00:16:06
foundation and is helping investigate
00:16:08
student deaths
00:16:10
she recently discovered more children
00:16:13
had died
00:16:14
[Music]
00:16:15
we have found 86 students that have died
00:16:19
but without having the actual government
00:16:21
records it's hard to say how many there
00:16:23
really are
00:16:24
it's
00:16:26
almost 100 that there are more students
00:16:28
that have died
00:16:30
[Music]
00:16:44
one of the 86 children who died at genoa
00:16:47
was carolyn fiskus's aunt mildred lowe
00:16:53
i have an old picture of my grandmother
00:16:55
and my aunt mildred and mildred looks
00:16:57
like she's about three years and they're
00:17:00
wearing
00:17:01
white people's clothes and shoes my
00:17:04
little my auntie must have moved you
00:17:06
know how little kids wiggle
00:17:10
in 1927 mildred lowe was taken from the
00:17:13
winnebago tribe and sent across the
00:17:16
plains of nebraska to school in genoa
00:17:20
they put her on the train and it started
00:17:23
moving and
00:17:24
that train whistle would blow and then
00:17:26
she got to genoa and she got off and
00:17:30
that was how it was it was horrible
00:17:32
lonely and scary
00:17:35
mildred died three years later
00:17:37
she was 12 years old
00:17:40
to lose a child and then to lose them in
00:17:42
that way you don't know what happened to
00:17:44
them
00:17:45
it's a very sad story for our family
00:17:50
[Music]
00:17:52
this is my wall of fame of my family
00:17:54
this is my mom and dad
00:17:56
this is on their 50th wedding
00:17:57
anniversary i think we had this taken my
00:18:00
dad's little ball-headed white guy and
00:18:01
my mom is ho chunk
00:18:03
and then this this my son and daughter
00:18:05
their graduation pictures
00:18:09
and these is my pride and joy my
00:18:11
grandchildren
00:18:13
put my aunt mildred up there with my
00:18:15
grandmother there they are
00:18:18
for me it's like this is missing this
00:18:20
piece
00:18:25
carolyn has spent the last decade trying
00:18:28
to find out what happened to mildred
00:18:30
after she died
00:18:32
she's probably at the spirit world but
00:18:34
she didn't get a send-off but
00:18:36
everybody's there we believe our
00:18:37
ancestors are there to greet her
00:18:40
but you know we want her spirit to know
00:18:43
that we know that too
00:18:46
carolyn has recently received mildred's
00:18:48
death certificate
00:18:51
it reveals mildred died from influenza
00:18:54
and meningitis
00:18:55
[Music]
00:18:57
when i got it i was like oh you know
00:18:59
just reading that is just kind of like
00:19:01
you uh say oh now this is real
00:19:04
she really did die there
00:19:07
and here's the evidence and it's hard i
00:19:09
think it's hard for me
00:19:12
pray for all the spirits who haven't
00:19:14
come home yet pray for them to find
00:19:16
their way on this smudge and um
00:19:21
the document states mildred's body was
00:19:23
sent home to the winnebago reservation
00:19:26
but carolyn is skeptical
00:19:29
they didn't have any record of her being
00:19:31
buried in the winnebago cemetery
00:19:34
and
00:19:35
my grandmother's record was there
00:19:38
but we didn't have mildred
00:19:42
she believes mildred was buried at genoa
00:19:45
in the school's lost cemetery
00:19:53
you want more than just to come here and
00:19:55
see this right
00:19:57
that's right
00:19:59
i'd like to
00:20:02
definitely locate the cemetery
00:20:05
defensive
00:20:07
probably a monument of some sort
00:20:15
[Music]
00:20:19
more than 30 years after james nash
00:20:21
first mentioned the cemetery a new
00:20:24
effort is underway to find the
00:20:26
children's graves
00:20:28
in this situation with this story
00:20:31
of native american boarding schools
00:20:33
there's a certain that feels like
00:20:34
there's kind of a sense of urgency
00:20:37
be nice to be involved in that first
00:20:39
step of finding them
00:20:42
state archaeologist rob bozell is
00:20:45
overseeing the field work
00:20:48
the only
00:20:50
map
00:20:51
that has been found
00:20:54
that depicts a cemetery is this 1899
00:20:57
nance county atlas
00:20:59
and i don't know if you can see that but
00:21:01
right there the word cem for cemetery
00:21:04
and across that's a symbol that
00:21:05
cartographers use for cemeteries
00:21:08
uh
00:21:10
this is a very coarse scale again
00:21:12
they're depicting something
00:21:14
south of the railroad tracks and east of
00:21:16
this property line
00:21:18
but it doesn't give us enough detail to
00:21:20
say exactly where it is we've also got
00:21:23
air photos it shows that the cemetery is
00:21:26
somewhere in this area
00:21:30
it's a big area
00:21:31
probably 200 acres
00:21:38
[Music]
00:21:52
using ground penetrating radar rob and
00:21:55
his team are looking for disturbances in
00:21:58
the soil which could indicate a grave
00:22:00
shaft
00:22:02
this pyramid looking thing
00:22:04
represents a difference in soil
00:22:07
compaction could be a grave could be a
00:22:09
big animal hole that's different than
00:22:11
the surrounding
00:22:13
natural soil
00:22:15
we have another one here same shape
00:22:19
and we also had two
00:22:22
same shape
00:22:24
going up a little farther here
00:22:28
so we have potentially
00:22:31
four
00:22:32
three or four anomalies
00:22:35
the discovery creates cautious optimism
00:22:38
it will take months to analyze the data
00:22:42
it's more than we've seen on our other
00:22:45
two or three trips out here i don't
00:22:47
think we saw any anomalies any place
00:22:49
else so we're at least seeing those
00:22:51
whether they're signatures of graves or
00:22:53
not don't know yet
00:22:58
my name is philip swantec
00:23:01
born and raised here at genoa
00:23:04
phil swantek owns the land where the
00:23:06
search for the children is taking place
00:23:09
he believes the canal which was
00:23:11
constructed shortly after the school's
00:23:13
closure in the 1930s destroyed the
00:23:16
cemetery
00:23:18
and you have to realize when they dug
00:23:20
that canal
00:23:21
they had a dredge or a drag line
00:23:24
that you could fit a big truck into
00:23:26
on the scoop
00:23:28
you know and
00:23:29
in the 1930s i don't think anybody was
00:23:32
too much concerned
00:23:33
if they run across bones or anything
00:23:35
[Music]
00:23:37
but no records have been found that
00:23:39
construction disrupted any graves
00:23:43
phil says he has mixed feelings about
00:23:46
what will happen if the cemetery is
00:23:48
found
00:23:49
i own the land and my opinion is if they
00:23:52
did find something there
00:23:54
i would probably want
00:23:57
it memorialized some way
00:23:59
but not disturbed
00:24:03
[Music]
00:24:10
[Applause]
00:24:13
eight of the children who lost their
00:24:14
lives in genoa belong to nebraska's
00:24:17
omaha tribe
00:24:21
you know they're they're speaking from
00:24:22
the grave you know that's just how we
00:24:24
see it we're here find us bring us home
00:24:29
chairman leanne demeric says if the
00:24:32
cemetery is found the omaha tribe will
00:24:34
repatriate their children and lay them
00:24:37
to rest on their ancestral lands
00:24:40
[Music]
00:24:42
they have to come home this is this is
00:24:44
their home to bring them back here is
00:24:46
going to bring closure for
00:24:48
for for them their spirits and their
00:24:50
loved ones and
00:24:52
and our community as a whole
00:24:54
this is shining a light on the united
00:24:56
states
00:24:57
it's not a good light
00:25:00
they wanted to eradicate us they wanted
00:25:02
to they didn't want us
00:25:04
to be a threat to them because of what
00:25:05
they were doing you know they
00:25:07
the bottom line is they wanted our land
00:25:14
across the country native american
00:25:16
tribes are mobilizing
00:25:18
as they begin searching for their lost
00:25:20
children
00:25:22
there are calls for a reckoning for the
00:25:24
trauma caused by boarding schools
00:25:29
dr samuel torres is from the national
00:25:31
native american boarding school healing
00:25:33
coalition based in minneapolis
00:25:38
this moment as hard as it was
00:25:40
it has been an important moment to
00:25:42
remind
00:25:43
folks from every background that this is
00:25:46
an important part of the story
00:25:48
of
00:25:49
the forming of the united states of
00:25:51
america that this land
00:25:54
was once indian land and it still is and
00:25:56
it always will be
00:25:58
he says there needs to be a commission
00:26:01
of inquiry as the first step towards
00:26:04
reconciliation
00:26:06
boarding school survivors are are not
00:26:08
getting any younger and and there's a
00:26:10
wealth of knowledge and a wealth of
00:26:12
information that uh that needs to be
00:26:16
shared
00:26:17
truth cannot be done without
00:26:20
a focus on accountability and justice
00:26:22
and only through that can substantive
00:26:25
healing actually take place
00:26:34
[Applause]
00:26:39
[Music]
00:26:47
for redwing keeping the culture alive
00:26:50
is key to healing from a painful past
00:26:55
so in my classroom
00:27:00
we reverse it
00:27:05
[Music]
00:27:08
for the ones who had to go through it so
00:27:11
we reverse it
00:27:13
instead it's a it's a happy atmosphere
00:27:16
instead it's joyous and it's exciting
00:27:18
and it's enthusiastic
00:27:21
and it's everything that our ancestors
00:27:23
were forbidden to have
00:27:26
that's why there's so much
00:27:28
energy
00:27:30
in my room
00:27:31
it's it's for them
00:27:39
[Music]
00:27:51
so
00:28:04
this is real they really were here
00:28:07
it was 20 years ago that i was last here
00:28:12
and we're still
00:28:14
looking for those children that died
00:28:22
in genoa the recent search failed to
00:28:25
locate the cemetery
00:28:28
they're there somewhere we know they're
00:28:31
under the ground somewhere and they need
00:28:33
to be honored
00:28:36
efforts to find the children who never
00:28:39
came home
00:28:40
continue
00:28:43
i can't rest until
00:28:46
i feel i've exhausted every possible
00:28:49
avenue to find the children
00:28:51
[Music]
00:29:07
[Music]
00:29:18
[Music]
00:29:25
is
00:29:34
[Music]
00:29:53
you
