‘Legacy of trauma': Oral histories project records stories of Nebraska’s Native American boarding school

Six-year-old Elsie Gilpin’s parents stayed with her as long as they could.

They packed sandwiches, loaded their daughter and her baby brother into a horse-drawn wagon, and journeyed south past Decatur, Nebraska. When they got to the train station in Tekamah, they watched their child climb aboard without them.

The train took Elsie to Genoa and deposited her in front of a sign written in a language she could not read: “U.S. Indian School.” It was 1929 when she stepped onto the sprawling campus of one of the nation’s largest federal Native American boarding schools.

She would not see her parents again for four years.

Today, the dark story of the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School exists mostly in government records. Letters from the school’s administration, census logs and disciplinary reports offer a glimpse of what took place on the school grounds, but they can’t provide the perspective of the children, like Elsie, whose lives the institution shaped.

Susana Geliga set out to change that. In the fall of 2024, she sat across from Elsie’s daughter, Wynema Morris, to record the story of a little girl who made that long journey to Genoa nearly a century ago.

The recorded interview is part of a larger oral histories project led by Geliga that aims to collect and preserve the stories of those who attended the Genoa school, as told by the descendants of former students.

“(The project) is such a wonderful opportunity to be inclusive of Native voices,” Geliga said. “That's the only way we can get a bigger picture.”

The school and its children

The Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School operated from 1884 to 1934. At its peak in 1932, the school’s 640-acre campus housed 599 students, who ranged in age from 4 to 22 years old. Children from more than 40 tribes were taken from their families and communities and stripped of their language and culture.

Historians and government officials in recent years have begun to scratch the surface of the nation’s boarding school era. Spurred by the discovery of unmarked graves at similar schools in Canada in 2021, The Interior Department under Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the federal and church funded boarding school systems.

The department’s published findings estimate at least 18,000 children were taken from their tribes and forced to attend schools founded in the name of assimilation. It also documented nearly 1,000 deaths and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools. Historians believe that the true death toll is likely much higher.

Potentially thousands of children were brought to the Genoa boarding school during the institution’s 50 years of operation. At least 86 are known to have died there. Records show nine students were buried on school grounds. The remains of 37 others were sent home to their tribes. The final resting place of 40 is still unknown.

Records show that diseases such as tuberculosis spread quickly through the school, leading to an unknown number of deaths. Testimony of a former teacher named Julie Carroll before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1929 detailed physical abuse.

There are no known living former students, but there are descendants, like Wynema Morris, able to talk about the school’s complex, painful history.

Elsie Gilpin was open with her children about her four-year stay at the Genoa school. She would tell them about the journey to campus, the friends she made and the continual hunger she felt. They were stories told through a child’s perspective, Morris said.

“She seemed to focus on fun and or at least things that were pleasant, rather than the really harsh treatment that they were subjected to,” Morris said. “She truly saw it through the eyes of a child.”

But the unpleasant memories would slip through. She told of her near-constant hunger and of the time the school’s matron beat her and other children for an unremembered infraction.

She spoke of her arrival that evening in 1929. Elsie and a group of other little girls were brought to the showers and scrubbed with lye soap. In another room, their hair was cut short and a liquid Elsie believed to be kerosene was poured over their heads.

Decades later, Elsie would tell her daughter, “I cannot stand or even get a whiff of something that has kerosene in it.”

The record keepers

For years, Geliga has worked to share the history of Native American boarding schools and understand the generational trauma the institutions wrought. She’s a professor with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project.

The Digital Reconciliation Project began in 2018 as a massive archival effort to gather and digitize thousands of records related to the school. The team was weeks away from the project’s planned end date last spring when the Trump Administration pulled its $450,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

“In April, we got a letter that said that we had lost our funding, so we had to really try to scrape together funding, because we had workers that needed to get paid,” Geliga said. “(The letter) said we weren’t meeting the goals that we had set forward, but we were.”

The project team did manage to pull together funding to reach the finish line. About 10,000 records were digitized and made available through the project’s website. More recorded interviews are to come.

Elsie Gilpin died Aug. 18, 2014. She was 92 years old. Morris grew emotional as she recounted her mother’s experiences at Genoa.

“It still hurts me, and this is the legacy of intergenerational trauma,” Morris said. “My mother, she was God, she was so well. She was one of the best mothers in the world. We couldn't get any better than her. And she was kind and gentle and so loving towards me and my sister that I couldn't imagine anyone treating her so brutally.”

Despite the feelings they invoke, Morris said her mother’s stories have to be shared. Through Geliga’s project, they’ll also be preserved.