Directed by Anne Worthington • Documentary • 2022 • 31 minutes

In 2021, in the small rural town of Genoa Nebraska, a harrowing search commenced to locate the graves of Native America 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. 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 per cent of Native American children were enrolled in these institutions. Many of these children left the school their culture broken. Some didn’t return home at all. Last year, the discovery of more than a thousand graves of children at the sites of former boarding schools in Canada pushed the U.S. 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.