Walking Where My Grandmother Walked: My Journey to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School

The GPS directed us down a residential street in eastern Nebraska to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School Museum. To my surprise, what remains of the 640-acre site that was once the fourth largest non-reservation Indian boarding school are just two buildings. They’re in close proximity to each other, including a museum that originally served as the boys’ dormitory.

A block away, a sign reads: “U.S. Indian School.” It is near train tracks where Native American children from more than 40 tribes across the country were dropped off and immediately sprayed with chemicals in case they had lice.

Among the children who attended the Genoa Indian School, which operated from 1884 to 1934, was my grandmother, Ellen Moore. She was 14 when she arrived in Genoa in 1920 from the Prairie Band Indian Reservation in Mayetta, Kansas. She was assigned to work in the bakery, according to school records.

My family does not know much about my grandmother’s experience at the Genoa Indian School because she — like thousands of other Native American children who attended Indian boarding schools — never spoke about what happened to her while she was there. That remained true for most of her 89 years of life.

A few years before she passed on, my grandmother did return to the Genoa Indian School with my aunt Lorraine Bessemer and a few cousins. She had traveled from the Michigan town where she settled in 1927 after marrying my grandfather and namesake, Levi Whitepigeon.

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