102 died at a Native American boarding school in Nebraska.
GENOA – Investigators say they have uncovered the names of 102 Native American students who died at a federally-operated boarding school in Nebraska.
The Omaha World-Herald reports that the discovery comes when ground-penetrating radar has been used in recent weeks to search for a cemetery that was once used by the school that operated in Genoa from 1884 to 1934. Until now, no graves have been found.
The Genoa school was one of the largest in a system of 25 federally run boarding schools for Native Americans. The dark history of abuse in schools is now the subject of a nationwide investigation.
Margaret Jacobs, co-director of the Genoa Indigenous School Digital Reconciliation Project, said that some of the names identified so far could be duplicates, but that the actual number of deaths is likely much higher.
Jacobs said that many of the children died of diseases, including tuberculosis. At the time, newspapers reported other deaths, such as drowning.
When the school closed, the documents were destroyed or scattered across the country. Locating them has proven to be a challenge for both the Genoa project and others working to collect information about schools.
Many of the names linked to Genoa were found in newspaper archives, including the school’s student newspapers, said Jacobs, who is also a history professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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