In 2021, in a rural Nebraska town, a harrowing search commenced to locate the graves of Native American children who were taken from their tribes and sent to the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, one of America’s largest and longest running boarding schools for indigenous children. Stolen Spirits: America's Stolen Generation is a 31-minute film about this community.
The Genoa school was part of a vast network of institutions for Native American children set up in the 19th and 20th centuries across the USA. Their purpose was to assimilate indigenous children into the white man’s world. By 1926, it’s estimated more than 80 percent of Native American children were enrolled in these institutions. Many of these children left the school with their culture broken; some didn’t return home at all. The discovery in 2021 of more than a thousand graves of children at the sites of former boarding schools in Canada pushed the USA to examine its own history. Presented by ABC journalist Stan Grant, whose family was impacted by Australia’s assimilationist policies, Stolen Spirits is a powerful and haunting story of one community’s attempts to uncover the truth about a painful past.
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