North Dakota House Bill 1603
is asking for $5 million to pay for efforts to return human remains to
Native American tribes around the state. This bill is intended for the
state to comply with the federal Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
UND president Andy Armacost says the university has already spent
over $2 million in the last several years to identify and respectfully
return items in UND’s collection to tribes in the state.
“What we now determine to be inappropriate and unethical work, dating
back to the very founding of UND, back in the late 1800s, and other
institutions in our state are facing the same,” Armacost said. “Some
might not even know that NAGPRA awaits them, and there’s work to be
done.”
State lawmakers say right now, some of the remains are in the hands of
the State Historical Society, while others are on university campuses in
North Dakota.
The left side of the Carlisle Main Post Cemetery after last summer’s
disinterments concluded. While 32 children have gone home in the last
seven years, more than 160 are still waiting. (Photo/Jenna Kunze)
By Native News Online Staff |
This week, the U.S. Office of Army
Cemeteries began its annual process of disinterring, identifying, and
returning the remains of eleven Native American children— who died more
than a century ago at a government-run Indian boarding school in
Pennsylvania— home to their closest living relatives.
The students are among nearly 200 who died and were buried in the government’s care between 1880 and 1910 while attending the nation’s flagship Indian boarding school, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Penn.
Over the last seven years, the Army has returned 32 children’s
remains back to their relatives. Each project was conducted over about a
month-long period during the summer by a team of professionals from the
Army Corps of Engineers’
Center of Expertise for Curation. The team worked with tribal nations
to carry out the process of exhuming and identifying each child’s
remains. The Army confirmed to NNO that it will be disinterring and
returning an additional 18 children in 2025.
This disinterment project
began on September 3, 2024, and will end on October 14, according to the
Office of Army Cemeteries.
In 1879, the Army’s Carlisle Barracks became the site of the nation’s first government-run Indian boarding school. Operating under the motto of “kill the Indian, save the man,” school
administrators tried to forcibly assimilate 7,800 Native American
children from more than 140 tribal nations through a mix of
Western-style education and hard labor.
Before it closed and the property
was transferred to the Army in 1918, the school buried the bodies of at
least 194 Indigenous children in the school cemetery, including 14 who
are marked with “unknown” grave markers.
Many students’ deaths were announced in the local newspaper at the time, noting causes of death as “that dread disease, consumption” or tuberculosis or detailing circumstances of unknown sickness.
“As long as the Army can avoid scrutiny and accountability and maintain
absolute control over the remains, it doesn’t care if tribes’ rights as
sovereigns are abused in the process,” said Greg Werkeiser, an attorney
with Cultural Heritage Partners, which has joined with the Native
American Rights Fund in representing the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska in a
lawsuit over the issue, along with the tribe’s general counsel, Danelle
Smith, at Big Fire Law & Policy Group. “Asking tribes to
subserviate themselves once again just continues the Army’s tradition of
abuses,” Werkeiser said. “Some traditions need to end.”
Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
Kirby Metoxen knew that many of his family members had been removed from
their families in the Oneida Nation and sent to boarding schools. These
schools were founded and run by both the United States Government and
Christian churches. The purpose was forced assimilation: to strip Native
American children of their language, dress, food and rituals. It is
estimated that by 1926, around 83% of Native children were attending
these schools.
Pupils at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, circa 1900.
As an adult Kirby was on a road trip
with friends to Pennsylvania from Wisconsin. While driving, he was
recounting the personal history of his family’s experience at one of
these schools in particular, the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. On a
whim, they decided to take a detour and visit the school.
She is home now.
The Grave of Ophelia Powless at the Holy Apostles Cemetery in Oneida, WI. Courtesy of Rodger Patience.
Unbeknownst to Kirby, there were
Oneida children buried in a cemetery on the school grounds, now a
military base. This revelation led him on an unexpected journey to
return those children to the Oneida Nation once and for all.
Top Photo: Rodger Patience and Kirby Metoxen at their StoryCorps interview in Green Bay, Wisconsin on January 27, 2022.By Carl Romey for StoryCorps.
For about the first 25 years or so, when students died, they were almost
invariably buried here at the school,” said Jim Gerencser, an archivist
at the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center, run by nearby Dickinson College.
CARLISLE, Penn. — The remains of 10 Native American and Alaska Native children who died more than 100 years ago while attending Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania are scheduled to be returned home to their communities in Alaska and South Dakota this week, according to a notice from the Department of the Army, which oversees the cemetery.
According to Northern Arapaho Tribal Chairman, Jordan Dresser, tribal member Yufna Soldier Wolf fought for the return of three Arapaho children who are now re-buried on the reservation in Ethete, Wyo.
In light of the recent discovery of a mass unmarked children’s grave in Canada at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, Dresser said he’d be surprised if there weren't more buried children at Carlisle.
“The records are not as accurate as we want to believe,” he said. “You’ve got to assume the worst.”
Through the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s leadership, 11 children were exhumed between 2017 and 2019. In addition to the Northern Arapaho, those children belonged to the Piegan/Blackfeet Tribe, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Oneida Nation, the Iowa Nation and the Modo Nation.
The current exhumation will begin on June 19 and is slated to take about a month, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Army Cemeteries. The cemetery will be closed during that time. Objections from family members and public comments can be mailed to Lt Col. Scott Tasler and Capt. Jason Netteler, the OAC project managers, or emailed.
