Here are some of the Native American-related news stories that made headlines this week:
Search resumes for lost cemetery at former Indian boarding school site
Archaeologists this week have been searching for the graves of former students on the grounds of the Indian Industrial School in Genoa, Nebraska.
“We’re going to take the soil down and first see if what’s showing up in the ground-penetrating radar are in fact gravelike features,” state archaeologist Dave Williams said. “And once we get that figured out, taking the feature down and determining if there are any human remains still contained within that area.”
Researchers believe more than 80 students died at the school, most from infectious diseases. So far, they’ve identified 49 students who died at the school. Some were returned home for burial, but others are believed to have been buried at the school.
The Genoa School was built in 1884 and was the fourth-largest in the federal boarding school system. It shut down in the early 1930s and today serves as a museum. The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project has digitized many of the school’s records, which can be viewed online.
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Oglala Lakota search for truth and healing at former boarding school
Nearly 30 years ago, Justin Pourier (Oglala Lakota), then a maintenance worker at the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, opened a door in the school’s oldest building and discovered a low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor.
There, he saw “three loaf-shaped dirt mounds… topped with small white, wooden crosses.”
When he told his supervisor about it, the man — a Jesuit priest — ordered him to stop “nosing around.” Later, workers would find the floor covered in concrete.
In 2021, after learning that the remains of more than 200 unmarked children had been found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, Pourier decided to come forward.
The July/August 2023 issue of Wired Magazine reports on the collaboration between the school and Marsha Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe with experience using ground penetrating radar to find human remains.
Red Cloud Indian School, formerly known as the Holy Rosary Mission, was founded in 1888 by the Catholic Church and ran as a boarding school until 1980.
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Read Small’s final report here:
Remains found at former Indian boarding school in Utah
A team of Utah State University anthropologists and a local historian have found and identified the graves of 12 Native American students at the site of the former Panguitch Indian School in southern Utah.
The five constituent bands making up the Paiute Indian Tribe in Utah, the Cedar Band of Paiutes, Kanosh Band of Paiutes, Koosharem Band of Paiutes, Indian Peaks Band of Paiutes and Shivwits Band of Paiutes, along with the Kaibab Band of Paiutes in nearby Arizona, expressed devastation over the find.
“Our hearts go out to the families of these children as we are left consider how best to honor and memorialize their suffering,” Ona Segundo, chairwoman of the Kaibub Band of Paiute Indians, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is but the first step toward healing and reconciliation and we will, in collaboration with the descendants of those children we believe we’ve identified, determine what our next steps will be.”
An estimated 150 students were forced to attend Panguitch during the four years it was open. The school shut down in 1909 because of “rampant illness,” Panguitch historian Steve Lee explained in 2021.
The research team has confirmed the bodies were those of two Kaibab Paiute children, four Shivwits children, and other children from other tribes.
Minnesota tribes call for reparations from university
Eleven Native American tribes have called on the University of Minnesota (UM) to make reparations for having profited from the sale of stolen Dakota and Ojibwe lands.
At the close of the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. The law provided states with 30,000 acres of federal land for each member in their congressional delegations. States were to sell the land and use the proceeds to build and fund public colleges that would focus on agriculture and the mechanical arts.
As VOA reported in April, a three-year study of UM’s history showed the U.S. paid $2,309 for 94,631 acres of land the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes were forced to cede.
The tribes involved have not come up with a number, and university officials are considering how best to proceed.
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Fake News of the 18th Century: The Wampanoag uprising that wasn’t
As JSTOR’s Daily reported this week, conspiracy theories and misinformation are nothing new: In the fall of 1738, a Wampanoag woman angrily told a group of English colonists on Nantucket Island that her tribe would soon rise in rebellion and kill them all.
The men believed her and spread the news, setting off panic. Colonists launched a preemptive strike on the woman’s village, only to find all the Wampanoag sleeping peacefully.
A Boston newspaper reported the “uprising” as fact, and the story spread as far as London, even after a second newspaper, the Boston Gazette, disproved the report.
This has historians wondering whether other reported uprisings may have been exaggerated or altogether false.
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