'Very meaningful to me.' Omaha Nation students visit Genoa Indian Boarding School
- Jessica Wade
- Aug 20, 2024
- 5 min read
Published: April 20, 2023
Dazhon Lasley flipped through a binder of documents that sat atop a display case in the Genoa Indian School Interpretive Center.
A few feet away, his fellow students from Omaha Nation High School were gathered around a scale model depicting the Genoa school’s 640-acre campus.
“And there’s the old barn that you can see is still standing. And there’s the railroad tracks that are still in use,” a volunteer with the center explained to the students.
But Lasley wasn’t keenly interested in the model. For months, the high school senior had been gathering information on his ancestors, filling in the gaps on relatives who had attended the boarding school in the town of Genoa, Nebraska, and how the experience had shaped their lives. He wanted to see what new records the interpretive center had to offer.
He paused his search through the binder when he came across an enlarged photo of a name penned in cursive: “Henry Lasley.”
His great-grandfather.
The fourth federal boarding school to be built in the U.S., the Genoa Indian Industrial School operated from 1884 to 1934. At its peak in 1932, the school housed 599 students, who ranged in age from 4 to 22 years old.
Students were brought to the Genoa campus from more than 40 tribes that spanned the United States, including children of the Umoⁿhoⁿ (Omaha) Nation.
On a sunny morning earlier this week, Lasley and 18 other students from the Omaha Nation High School walked through the doors of the Genoa interpretive center. The center serves as a museum and an education center located within a two-story brick building that once held the boarding school’s manual training classes.
It was the first field trip to the center organized by tribal government teacher Brent Wojcik, and for a majority of the students, the trip was their first time visiting the Genoa school grounds.
“I look at it as a full-circle process,” Wojcik said. “Kids were forced to come here 100 years ago, and now we’re choosing to come here on our own accord.”
Like Lasley, many of the students have identified one or more relatives who attended the Genoa school. The best way to teach history is to help students find a direct connection, Wojcik said.
Through a class assignment, Lasley has filled his own binder with his family’s connection to the school.
His maternal great-grandparents, Henry Lasley and Bertha Wolfe, met at the school. There were records of Henry participating on the track team and of Bertha’s parents saving money to bring her home for the summer.
The federal government would pay to send students home only once every three years unless parents or guardians were able to pay travel expenses for more frequent trips.
Lasley compared his own time at a boarding school with the experience of his grandparents.
For four years, Lasley attended Riverside Indian School near Anadarko, Oklahoma. He transferred to the Omaha Nation High School in Macy, Nebraska, which is on the Omaha Indian Reservation, soon after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Riverside still operates as a boarding school today, but encourages education around tribal cultures and spirituality as well as traditional academics.
“My experience at Riverside Indian School is like same place, but different time,” Lasley said. “The school I went to was great for me, it was the best place for me to go. It was also a choice for me, but for others, it wasn’t.”
The federally funded Native American boarding schools have been criticized as a form of cultural genocide. Children were taken there in the name of assimilation, at times involuntarily. While the experiences of students differed, abuse was recorded.
On arrival, children were forced to cut their hair, traditional clothing or possessions were taken away, and the use of Native languages was met with varying degrees of discipline.
That loss of language is still mourned today.
Michelle Walker-Alley, a field trip chaperone and cultural aide with Omaha Nation Schools, is gradually taking her language back.
“I dance at powwows, I know how to bead, I know how to sew, but the one thing that was missing was the language, and that’s something that’s very important for us to keep alive, not only our Omaha language, but all the tribes,” Walker-Alley said.
The full legacy left by the nation’s federal Native American boarding schools is still being uncovered.
Renewed efforts to locate the school’s cemetery and identify students who died on the campus have uncovered at least 86 students who are believed to have died at the school. Nine are recorded as having been buried on school grounds. The remains of 37 were sent home, and the final resting place of about 40 is still unknown.
Records found show that disease played a large role in the deaths of those at the Genoa school. An accidental shooting and a drowning were recorded as well.
With the help of an old plat map and a specially trained dog team, a potential site of the school’s cemetery was identified last May.
Data gathered from ground-penetrating radar surveys last year shows four anomalies consistent with the presence of graves.
If remains are found, tribal leaders may choose to leave the buried where they lie and construct a memorial to mark the site.
Another option would be to excavate one of the four anomalies to see if burials remain, if the children were exhumed, or if the anomalies aren’t graves but something else entirely.
The U.S. Indian Boarding Schools served as a blueprint for Canada’s Indigenous residential schools, where the discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves brought renewed attention to practices that historians have described as cultural genocide.
Shortly after the discovery in Canada, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative. The effort led to a massive report, released last spring, on the U.S. schools.
The federal investigation has so far identified more than 500 deaths at 19 schools, though the Interior Department said that number could climb to the thousands or even tens of thousands. The department has so far found at least 53 burial sites at or near U.S. boarding schools.
Today, the Genoa Indian School Interpretive Center gathers and presents artifacts and records on the Genoa school, while educating the public on Native American culture and history.
Tribal flags hang from the building’s ceiling, traditional clothing has been donated and displayed by descendants, photos of former students in their later years hang above a display, and the walls hold the memory of students who carved their names into the brick.
Walker presented a painting for display in the interpretive center.
“We’re still here, we still need to be known,” Walker said. “It’s just not something that should be swept under the rug. Come check it out, come see what they were doing here.”
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