Genoa U.S. Indian School Museum

Genoa sits on the last Nebraska land the Pawnee held. A treaty of September 24, 1857 gave them a reservation along the Loup, where the government insisted it be, though the Pawnee had wanted land south of the Platte. Lakota war parties attacked the reservation villages eight times in the first year, and from 1873 the Pawnee could not leave without a pass. On October 8, 1874 they agreed to sell the reservation, and in waves through October 1875 they went to Indian Territory.

The government already owned the agency property, and on February 20, 1884 it opened the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School here, the fourth off-reservation boarding school of the Office of Indian Affairs, built to assimilate Native children away from their families. Children came from dozens of nations; on arrival they were given new clothes and names and forbidden their own languages. Enrollment grew from 74 to nearly 600, and the campus to more than 30 buildings. At least 86 students died. Nine were buried in the school cemetery, 37 were sent home, and what became of 40 is not known. The cemetery is lost, probably disturbed when a power canal was cut across the campus in the 1930s, and searches in 2021 and 2023 have not found it. The school closed in 1934.

The Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation, formed in 1990, keeps a museum in the old manual training building, with the flags of the nations whose children were sent here. In 2026 Summer Copeland, an Omaha descendant, became its first Native American president.