On her family's farm in Iowa, Carolyn Fiscus burns sage and prays that her Aunt Mildred's spirit will find its way home.
The 74-year-old never met her mother's sister, but the question of what happened to Aunt Mildred is a mystery that has long tormented her family.
"My mum would say she's still lost somewhere … that the spirit didn't come back," says Carolyn, an enrolled member of Nebraska's Winnebago Native American tribe.
In 1927, nine-year-old Mildred Lowe was taken from her mother at the Winnebago reservation and sent nearly 200km by train to the US Indian Industrial School in Genoa, Nebraska.
She was one of hundreds of thousands of Native American children taken from their families and tribes and placed into state and church-run boarding schools in America between 1819 and 1969.
Within three years of arriving at Genoa, Mildred was dead.
For the past 10 years, Carolyn has been trying to find out what happened to Mildred's body after she died.
She believes Mildred was buried at Genoa, in the school's cemetery.
Last year, the harrowing discovery of more than a thousand unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the sites of former boarding schools in Canada shocked the world.
It has now sparked a reckoning in the United States, where it is estimated tens of thousands of Native American children could have died at boarding school institutions.
In June 2021, the US Department of the Interior launched a historic investigation into the country's own boarding school legacy, a raw subject for Native Americans which has until recently received little national attention.
In Genoa, the site of one of the US's largest and longest-running institutions for Native American children, the revelations in Canada were the catalyst to finding out how many children died at the school and to locating the school's cemetery.
Carolyn hopes attempts to find the cemetery will finally unearth the "missing piece" in her family's painful history.
The lost cemetery
Today, all that remains of the US Indian Industrial School are a few barns and buildings scattered across the rural mid-western town of Genoa.
Once a sprawling campus straddling 640 acres, it housed children from more than 40 Native American tribes during its five decades of operation.
The school's former workshop building has been restored and is now a museum run by the Genoa US Indian School Foundation, a group of local volunteers.
Like many other boarding schools for Indigenous children across the US, Genoa was modelled on a system devised by US military officer Richard Henry Pratt, a renowned "Indian killer" who was involved in the brutal massacres of Native Americans during the Indian Wars.
Richard Pratt believed that by stripping away Indigenous culture, language and beliefs, he could "kill the Indian and save the man".
"That was the motto and they wanted to make the children into white people," says Carolyn. "We call it genocide, as tribal people."
By 1926, an estimated 83 per cent of Native American children were enrolled in these US institutions.
Judi gaiashkibos's mother Eleanor went to the boarding school at Genoa and, like many former students, found it difficult to talk about her experiences there.
Judi recalls how a "haunting look" would pass across her mother's face when she spoke of Genoa.
There was "a sadness to the tone of her voice. She tried to tell the good things," says Judi.
Over time, the veil of silence among survivors began to lift.
In 1990, at the request of former students, the Genoa Foundation began hosting annual school reunions.
It was through these reunions that many students began sharing their stories, with many finding a sense of healing in the process.
"I started going to the reunions after my mother died," says Judi. "So I got to learn about what it was like and meet the people that could have been at school with my mother."
Judi says while people at the reunions liked to "think about the good things", there was a darker reality to what life was like for the children sent to these institutions.
"These were not schools, it was a prison camp, a work camp," she says. "You were stripped of all your cultural belongings, your hair, which is so sacred to our people, was all cut off."
The school was self-sufficient and the children were "used as labour", she says.
"It wasn't a lovely place to learn your education. You learned the three Rs half of the day but it was a very watered-down curriculum.
There are no living survivors of the Genoa school, but Foreign Correspondent has obtained footage, which has never been broadcast, from the first reunion.
Students recalled being beaten for speaking their native language and being whipped after trying to run away. Others described the school as being run like "a military school".
James Nash, who attended the school in late 1920s, made a disturbing revelation.
With film crew in tow, James walked out to the fields, telling the story of how two classmates had died at the school and were buried in a cemetery on the school's grounds.
"Kids started dying at an early age," he explained. "They had to do something with them. I don't think it was possible those days to send them home, the bodies. So they buried them here."
James said he had spent a week searching through government archives in Washington DC for any record of his classmates' deaths, but found nothing.
He believed the deaths had been covered up.
"I think probably, whoever was operating the Genoa Indian School had those records destroyed because they were derogatory to their image," James told the film crew.
The next day, the Genoa Foundation returned to the fields and removed the topsoil in an effort to uncover the cemetery.
But their efforts were futile. The cemetery remained lost.
The Genoa Foundation set up a stone marker to honour those who had died at the school.
According to Nikki Drozd, a Genoa local and volunteer with the foundation, until the news out of Canada last year, the children who died at Genoa had been largely forgotten.
"Those that grew up in Genoa knew and understood what happened here … we were taught in school about Native American boarding schools, assimilation," she says.
"But we weren't aware of the cemetery. At least myself, I know I didn't stop to think about the students that died here. What happened to them?"
A hidden past
Dr Margaret Jacobs, a historian of Native American studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has long suspected the US was heading for a reckoning with its hidden past.
It was on a trip to Australia in 1998 — the year after the release of the historic "Bringing Them Home" report into the state-sanctioned separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents – that Dr Jacobs began to wonder whether the US too had its own "stolen generations".
"I knew about the Indian boarding schools but in the United States, we never talked about [them] in that way, as stealing children," says Dr Jacobs.
Only now is the dreadful toll of the US Indian boarding school system coming into focus.
While the discovery of graves in Canada last year made global headlines, the blueprint for these Indigenous children's boarding schools originated in the US.
Over 400 boarding schools operated across 37 US states, compared with 150 in Canada.
Two weeks ago, the US government released a report confirming "more than 500 children" perished in 19 of these institutions.
As investigations continue, "the number of children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools could be in the thousands or tens of thousands," the report said.
"This whole history is almost invisible and yet so many native people are hurting from this," says Dr Jacobs.
"What does it tell us about boarding schools that they all had cemeteries?
For Judi gaiashkibos, the news from Canada was the trigger to start asking tougher questions about the fate of the children who died at her mother's school in Genoa.
As the head of Nebraska's Commission on Indian Affairs, she felt a research project was needed to "focus on the children that died" in Genoa and to finally tell the whole story.
Judi asked Dr Jacobs, who was already working alongside the Genoa Foundation and tribal leaders on a digital project, to unravel the history of the school in Genoa, to refocus their efforts.
The research team was unable to source government records, so they started trawling through local newspaper archives and soon compiled a list of 86 children reported as having died at the school, some in "suspicious" circumstances.
"Spinal paralysis, heart failure, there is a lot of accidental deaths," says Dr Jacobs.
"We've come across a drowning, a child who was hit by a train. Diseases were sweeping through these schools but in many cases they weren't returning the children to their homes when they died and they were burying them on site.
"It's just chilling to me to think that for so many children the schools were death traps."
Without government records, the team has been unable to say exactly how many died but they predict the toll is almost certain to rise.
Among the 86 confirmed deaths at Genoa is Carolyn Fiscus's aunt, Mildred Lowe.
Carolyn recently received Mildred's death certificate from the research team, which confirms her aunt died at the boarding school in Genoa at age 12. The cause of death is listed as meningitis and influenza.
Intriguingly, it says Mildred's body was sent home to the Winnebago cemetery but Carolyn is sceptical. She still believes Mildred is buried in the lost cemetery at Genoa.
"They have a list of all the people buried in our Winnebago cemetery and she's not on that list. She never came home," Carolyn says.
Dr Jacobs remains puzzled by what happened to the cemetery after the school closed. It's a challenge she says that has been "putting me through my paces as a historian".
"We know there was a cemetery," she says. "In some of the death notices of children, they'll say they were buried in the school cemetery."
The search for the cemetery
More than 30 years after James Nash first mentioned a cemetery at the 1990 Genoa school reunion, a new effort to find Genoa's lost children is underway.
Judi gaiashkibos's department is spearheading the search.
Last year, she brought in Nebraska's then-state archaeologist, Rob Bozell, to start scouring the landscape around the former Genoa school grounds for evidence of graves.
Using ground-penetrating radar, Rob has been probing the fields for underground soil disturbances, hoping to discover the tell-tale signs of a grave shaft.
Rob is being guided by an 1899 county map that clearly shows the presence of a cemetery marked by a cross and the letters "CEM".
But the map is not to scale, making it difficult to pin down an exact search area.
"[It's] depicting something south of the railroad tracks and east of this property line," he says, studying the old map.
"But it really doesn't give us enough detail to say exactly where it is. I mean, that cross right there is probably 200 acres."
Phil Swantek grew up not far from Genoa and owns around 300 acres of land that once belonged to the school, including the site where it's believed the old cemetery lies.
Phil was part of the original group that tried to find the cemetery in the 1990s with James Nash.
He believes a canal constructed shortly after the school's closure in 1934 could have destroyed the graves, although no records have been found to confirm the construction team encountered anything unexpected.
"In the 1930s, I don't think anybody was too much concerned if they ran across bones or anything," says Phil.
Late last year, Judi gaiashkibos began notifying the Native American tribes who lost children at Genoa.
Eight of the children identified by the research team belonged to Nebraska's Omaha tribe, whose chairman Leander Merrick wants their remains repatriated back to the reservation if they are found so their spirits can "rest in peace" on ancestral lands.
"These deaths are their voice, they're speaking from the grave," he says. "They're saying, 'Hey come, we're here. Find us, bring us home.'"
Phil Swantek would support the Omaha Nation's request to have their children returned but has "mixed feelings" about what would happen if the cemetery was found.
"I own the land and my opinion is if they did find something there, I would probably want it memorialised some way, but not disturbed," he says.
There are now calls for a commission of inquiry into the trauma caused by America's boarding school era, which Leander Merrick says would be a first step towards atoning for what he says is a crime committed against his people.
"This is shining a light on the United States," he says. "It's not a good light. They want to hide the truth, how this country really was acquired. It was through blood at our people's expense. They tried to kill us off."
Judi says finding the children who died at Genoa is now her highest priority and she won't rest until she has "exhausted every possible avenue".
For Carolyn Fiscus, finding the lost cemetery would mean a mystery that has haunted her family for decades can finally be solved.
"[Aunt Mildred's] spirit tells me, you know, one way or another, she'll get to come home."
Watch Stolen Spirits presented by Stan Grant on Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8pm on ABC TV and iview, and streaming live on the ABC News Facebook page and ABC In-Depth YouTube channel.
