Remains of Native American children to be returned to Oklahoma

This week, the U.S. Army announced that 19 Native American children will be disinterred from the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where they were buried after being taken from their families more than a century ago.

After more than a century, Native American children buried at a Pennsylvania boarding school will be returned to their families, marking a significant step toward healing

VIDEO: https://www.koco.com/article/remains-of-native-american-children-returned-oklahoma/65985824 

"These children have been waiting anywhere from 145 years to 126 years to come home,” said Norene Starr, special projects coordinator for the Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes

The effort to bring the children home has been ongoing for years, as tribes have been asking for their relatives back from the boarding school where more than 200 children died and are now buried.

"They have been gone, they’ve been missing, all this time, their families had no idea where they went or what happened to them. Some of them were never notified,” Starr said.

The 19 children are from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe expressed hope that the journey to peace can begin, despite the long wait.

"It's going to bring a lot of peace, maybe not so much closure. It's something we have to do, and we have to do it for our people, and these children, we need to bring them home, so they can rest where they came from,” Starr said.

The tribes view the homecoming as a step toward healing after more than a century of loss.

"There is peace, and healing, and we have to be aware, we have to know and acknowledge everything that has happened before us," Starr said.

(Use the search bar to find all the coverage on Carlisle and the repatriation of these children...Trace) 

 

Army Conducts Eighth Year of Disinterment and Return of Native American Children at Carlisle Barracks

The U.S. Army will continue its mission to reunite Native American families with their ancestors through the eighth year of disinterment efforts at Carlisle Barracks, beginning on September 5, 2025.

The individuals scheduled for disinterment include Wallace Perryman of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, along with Belle Cahoe, Wash E. He, Tabitha Carroll, Jane Lumpfoot, Leah Road Traveler, Percy Whitebear, George Harrison, Charles Whiteshield, Matavito Horse, Nannie Little Robe, Dora Morning, Louise Thunder, Giles Hands, Ruben Tanpeds, Henry Morning, William Sammers, Abe Lincoln, and Elsie Davis—all from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.   

READ MORE: https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/army-conducts-eighth-year-of-disinterment-and-return-of-native-american-children-at-carlisle-barracks

REDUCE STEAL REMOVE ERASE DISENROLL

by Blog Editor Trace L Hentz  

I have followed the disturbing tribal dis-enrollment issue many years, first as a journalist and then as a concerned adoptee who is still without tribal membership.  

First of all, since CONQUEST, the governments of Canada and the US had goals.

The inter-country ARENA program and the Indian Adoption Projects were clearly planned genocide, essentially kidnapping and trafficking in children, as an act of war on Indian families.   

Other goals?  Reduce the populations.  Write bad treaties then break them.  Steal more land.  Move who is left on to concentration camps but call it a "reservation" or reserve.  Remove children on those reserves to faraway places like the Carlisle Industrial Boarding School.  Erase children permanently from tribal rolls.  It's how the governments of Canada and the US planned this.  They kill us by military force then colonize remaining savages, then they upped the game to use paper genocide with bad or fake history, to where we are now:  blood quantum sorcery.   

They'll keep us divided, a Third World stuck in poverty and fighting for scraps forever.   

That was the plan. 

Let me start over...

Adoptees want to go home, meet family and if possible, have a relationship with tribal relatives.  We were dis-enrolled essentially and the fake papers we were given are not real birth certificates, not tribal membership, and not land rights and treaty promises. (Yes, some adoptees found out they were enrolled before they were taken away.)

For an adoptee today, Tribal membership would be icing on the cake, and all of us absolutely deserve it!

Too many Tribal leaders are not traditional, as I see it.  I see Tribal leaders adapted to the white man rules too well.  Clearly it's about money now, not us, and not our recovery.

Why?  Do they not see we had no CHOICE as children adopted out... It wasn't our fault.  Is this also about money?

Are you kidding me? 

Since 2004-5, I took the stance there was no awareness of the cultural genocide on Indigenous People since conquest.  I also could see how too many adoptees were struggling to get their tribal membership.  Too many cannot and do not approach their tribe without papers, or some kind of legal proof.  Who do we call?  Phone messages and requests for help go unanswered.  One Native adoptee told me a judge refused her request for her adoption file in Utah, which is against federal law and what the Indian Child Welfare said is our right. 

Sadly, Reserve Indians do not prioritize bringing STOLEN GENERATIONS back, and many do not know how many adoptees are out here, spread across North American and beyond.  

Now tribes are disenrolling their own people? Casinos changed the landscape. Tribes are protecting their profits.  Greed, as you know, is a disease.

As the governments planned this, it was to control tribal populations. And it worked.

Go READ:

"You're No Indian" Examines the Disenrollment Issue (documentary) (top photo)

LINK: https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-entertainment/your-e-no-indian-examines-the-disenrollment-issue 

 

FILM: https://www.yourenoindian.com/ 

Federal Government ‘Stuck Tribes With a Bill’ for Indian Boarding Schools, Lawsuit Alleges

By Nancy Marie Spears

Navajo students after entering the Carlisle Indian School in 1882. Photo courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

A year ago, the Department of the Interior concluded a first-ever accounting of the toll that Indian boarding schools inflicted on Indigenous people in this country over centuries.  Nearly a thousand Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Native American children were buried in 74 marked or unmarked gravesites across 65 school sites. 

Another number also stood out: the $23.3 billion the U.S. government spent on a system of forced assimilation that subjected tens of thousands of children to torture and abuse — the bulk of which was at times paid for out of Native Nations’ trust funds from the sale of Indigenous lands.

In the wake of these revelations, a class-action lawsuit filed by the Washoe Tribe and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes alleges the $23.3 billion “barely scratches the surface” of the total losses to Indigenous communities imposed by the federal boarding school program between 1871 and 1969. 

They say the tally does not account for funds generated by forced child labor, money removed from Native Nations’ trust accounts and the resulting economic harm of extracting children from their families and tribes.

The lawsuit, filed May 22 in a Pennsylvania U.S. District Court, calls on the federal government to show its receipts by preserving and publishing “all documents related to the Boarding School Program on an openly accessible electronic database,” as well as all documents used to prepare the Interior Department’s July 2024 investigative report  “until a full accounting is provided and authenticated.”

An attorney representing the tribe describes this accounting as a key step toward economic justice for tribes.

“The United States forcibly separated Native children from their parents, and systematically sought to erase their cultural identity, killing, torturing, starving, and sexually assaulting many in the process and doing untold damage to generations,” the plaintiffs allege in their 68-page complaint. “And it made the Native Nations put up the money to pay for it all.”

Navajo students before and after entering the Carlisle Indian School in 1882. Photos courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

The Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education are named as defendants. They have 30 days from the time of filing to respond to the complaint or seek a continuance. 

Agency spokespeople said they could not comment on pending litigation, but in a statement noted a broader obligation to tribes.

“The Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs remain committed to our trust responsibilities of protecting tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources,” it said, “in addition to its duty to carry out the mandates of federal law with respect to American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages.” 

Plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case represent the thousands of students across 574 federally recognized tribes whose children were forced to attend boarding schools designed to strip them of their culture and language. 

One of those children was a Wichita boy, Oscar Stephens, who is named in the suit. In 1905, the 10-year-old was playing by a creek near his home when he was taken by federal agents. He spoke two words of English at the time: “yes” and “no.” 

“The United States stuck tribes with a bill for the Boarding School Program. at points, as much as 95% of the funding for Indian boarding schools came from ‘Indian trust fund monies.’ raised by selling Indian land.” 

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

Oscar was initially sent to Oklahoma’s Riverside Indian School. Three years later, on Sept. 10, 1908, he was enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, weighing 94 pounds with “numerous scars,” the complaint reads. 

Oscar’s student file notes he was routinely sent on forced “outings” — a euphemism at the time for children sent away from school to perform free labor. 

“His head was shaved, and he was beaten for speaking his native tongue, the only language he knew,”  court documents state. “Over the years as a young teenager he was routinely placed with families to do servile work — his file described him being sent to do housework for a family at the age of 14 — and routinely ran away.”

👉SEE Oscar Stephens’ student file from the Carlisle Indian School

Oscar Stephens Student File From Carlisle Indian School Download

Akin to apprenticeships or indentured servitude, the “outing system” was formalized by Richard Pratt, who opened the first federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a half-hour drive from Harrisburg, where the class-action was filed. 

The lawsuit describes “outings” like the ones Oscar was sent on as central to the boarding schools’ mission. Indigenous children were relocated from schools to farms and non-Native homes to perform manual labor — earnings they often never saw that helped sustain the system of servitude.

In an 1895 letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, Pratt said the practice “brings the Indian youth directly in contact with good, wholesome, civilized life, and they absorb it rapidly, and it absorbs them, and they become a part of it.”

---

Chicago-based attorney Adam Levitt is part of the legal team that represents the tribes suing on behalf of boarding school students like Oscar. 

He said there are many unique aspects of the suit brought by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes in Oklahoma and the Washoe Tribe in the Lake Tahoe region of Nevada and California. 

Adam Levitt

Though they are asking for an accounting of boarding school spending, they are not yet demanding funds be returned to tribes. 

“We need to know where the money went,” Levitt told The Imprint. “So this is not a reparations case, or a damages case. Whether money will at some point change hands stands to be seen.”

He described the early-stage case as long overdue, and the first-ever attempt to request such an accounting from the federal government. 

In a 2023 ruling in the Brackeen v. Haaland case that unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch discussed the relevance of such an accounting. 

“The United States stuck tribes with a bill for the Boarding School Program,” Gorsuch wrote, “at points, as much as 95% of the funding for Indian boarding schools came from ‘Indian trust fund monies,’ raised by selling Indian land.” 

The plaintiffs acknowledged the work it will require to document  and itemize boarding school expenses but noted “that such an accounting may be hard is no excuse.”

“The suffering so long inflicted cannot be undone,” the complaint reads. “But the law does not turn an uncaring eye toward historic wrongs. Justice demands a remedy. That remedy begins with an accounting.”

 

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Sac and Fox Olympian: Jim Thorpe: Lit by Lightning (film)

 

EDITOR NOTE: I was able to interview Jim Thorpe's family member many years ago when I was a staffwriter at News From Indian Country in Wisconsin.  Jim Thorpe was a survivor of Carlisle Indian Boarding school.  I wrote a chapter about him in a history book "Olympics at the Millennium," published by Rutgers Press.

 

• A new documentary, "Jim Thorpe: Lit by Lightning," about the iconic Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, will premiere on The History Channel on July 7.
• The film is executive produced by LeBron James' and Maverick Carter's Uninterrupted and directed by acclaimed Indigenous filmmaker Chris Eyre.
• The documentary explores Thorpe's life and legacy as one of the greatest athletes of all time, examining his athletic achievements and the intersection of identity and sport.

Executive produced by a 21-time NBA All-Star and directed by an acclaimed Indigenous director, a documentary about iconic Oklahoma Native American athlete Jim Thorpe will light up television this summer.

The History Channel will premiere for its new, two-hour documentary “Jim Thorpe: Lit by Lightning” at 7 p.m. Monday, July 7. It will be available to stream the next day.

The documentary is executive produced by LeBron James' and Maverick Carter’s award-winning athlete storytelling brand Uninterrupted and in association with INE Entertainment, Five All in the Fifth, and Motion Entertainment, a WPP Media company.

In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors

From Coalition of Native and Allies: www.coalitionofnativesandallies.org

Chip Fox is an important photographer/reporter for the Inquirer and Indian Country Today and friend of CNA.  He covered the adoption story of our Native American board member Kelley Bova in the Inquirer who was adopted by a White family in 1963. In Indian Country Today he covered the story when Kelley accompanied the remains of two Native Children from the Carlisle Indian School back to her homelands in South Dakota, among other important articles for Indian Country. His latest article in Indian Country Today https://ictnews.org/news/in-the-footsteps-of-our-ancestors is a moving combination of stories from the Carlisle School and stunning photo collages that he created. He's a writer and an artist. We wanted to make sure you saw this important article.

 

 

JUST TWO OF THE IMAGES FROM THE CHIP'S ARTICLE:   Students Nancy Renville, left, and Justine LaFromboise were among six Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake students, four boys and two girls, who arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on Nov. 6, 1879. The first group of students had arrived one month earlier. The four male students died at the school or soon after being returned home while ill. Amos LaFromboise (not pictured) who died 20 days after arriving at the school, was the first to die. The remains of Amos LaFromboise and Spirit Lake student Edward Upright were finally returned to their tribes in 2023, where a ceremonial fire was lit to burn during the 4 days of mourning. The background image by Charles Fox shows the fire burning at the repatriation cemetery on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Historic photos of the students are courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. (Photo illustration by Charles Fox/Special to ICT)

 

 

Native students arriving at Carlisle Indian Industrial School faced the cutting of their long hair, a disturbing cultural violation. This barber’s chair was photographed by Charles Fox at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where it was part of an exhibit, "Away from Home," on Native boarding schools. The background photo, courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society, shows a group of students in March 1892. (Photo illustration by Charles Fox/Special to ICT)

 

 

National Monument at Carlisle?

graves of children at Carlisle Indian Industrial School

NOTE:  I've been to Carlisle to see what is left of that school. I've been to Jim Thorpe, PA where the Olympic Athlete is still buried. Nothing, no words, no building or a gravesite can bring back the millions and millions who were murdered on this soil... The colonizer's goal of genocide was a success, by also burying the truth...Trace

President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school site in Pennsylvania to commemorate the resilience of tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and similar abusive institutions

 HARRISBURG, Pa. -- President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania on Monday to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.

The creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument — announced during a tribal leaders summit at the White House — is intended to confront what Biden referred to as a “dark chapter” in the nation's history.

“We're not about erasing history. We're about recognizing history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” Biden said. “I don't want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now and pretend it didn't happen.”

Thousands of Native children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and “civilize" the children so they would better fit into white society.

It was the first school of its type and became a template for a network of government-backed Native American boarding schools that ultimately expanded to at least 37 states and territories.

“About 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlisle — stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong making the Carlisle Indian school a national model,” Biden told the White House summit.

Thorpe's great-grandson, James Thorpe Kossakowski, called Biden's designation an important and “historic” step toward broadening Americans' understanding of the federal government's forced assimilation policy.

“It's very emotional for me to walk around, to look at the area where my great-grandfather had gone through school, where he had met my great-grandmother, where they were married, where he stayed in his dorm room, where he worked out and trained,” Kossakowski, 54, of Elburn, Illinois, said in an interview.

The children were often taken against the will of their parents, and an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children died at the institution in Carlisle, including from tuberculosis and other diseases.

There are ongoing efforts to return the children's remains, which were buried on the school's grounds, to their homelands.

“They represent 50 tribal nations from Alaska to New Mexico to New York and I think that symbolizes how horrific Carlisle was,” said Beth Margaret Wright, a Native American Rights Fund lawyer. She has represented tribes trying to get the Army to return their children's remains and is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, which has children still buried there.

Carlisle was a model for many other schools that came after it and a huge majority of tribal nations that exist today have stories of their children being sent to Carlisle, Wright said.

In September, the remains of three children who died at Carlisle were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

At least 973 Native American children died at government-funded boarding schools that operated for more than 150 years, according to an Interior Department investigation.

During a dozen public listening sessions over the past several years hosted by the Interior Department, survivors of the schools recalled being beaten, forced to cut their hair and punished for using their native languages.

The forced assimilation policy officially ended with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. But the government never fully investigated the boarding school system until the Biden administration.

Biden in October apologized on behalf of the U.S. government for the schools and the policies that supported them.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools against their families’ will, said no single action would adequately address the harms caused by the schools. But she said the administration's efforts have made a difference and the new monument would allow the American people to learn more about the government's harmful policies.

“This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is new for many people in our nation," Haaland said in a statement.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the assimilation campaign.

Monday's announcement marks the seventh national monument created by Biden, who has also altered or enlarged several others. In 2021, he restored the boundaries of two monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, on land in southern Utah that's sacred to tribes after the monuments were shrunk under former President Donald Trump.

The 25-acre site (10 hectares) in central Pennsylvania will be managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. The site is part of the campus of the U.S. Army War College.

For Wright, one of the most powerful places at the Carlisle school are the imprints of since-removed tracks for trains that delivered children there.

“There's no longer train tracks there, but you can see where they might have been and where their children would have arrived for the first time and seen a place so far away and seen a place so horrific,” Wright said.

Native American tribes and conservation groups are pressing for more monument designations before Biden leaves office.

 

DO MORE THAN APOLOGIZE: Native American Leaders Call Again for Action After Boarding Schools Apology

The timing of the APOLOGY did seem strange but it is ELECTION season... Trace

By Marianna McMurdock | October 31, 2024  

  

Native American leaders and survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system are calling on the Biden administration to do more than apologize to facilitate healing for their communities.

Their calls have been mounting for decades, but the remarks marked a milestone: the first time a U.S. President ever acknowledged and apologized for the system where federal agents removed children from their parents, often at gunpoint, sending them to schools thousands of miles from home, stripping families of their language and culture.

 

 

 

 

The exact number of children who were forced into boarding schools in the U.S. for over 150 years is unknown, due to poor record keeping, but nearly 19,000 have been confirmed. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse was rampant at the schools often run by religious institutions. Some children were referred to only as numbers, pre-teen girls were raped and sent home pregnant. Thousands never returned home.

Native American girls from the Omaha tribe at Carlisle School, Pennsylvania. (Getty Images)

Addressing the public on the Gila River Reservation outside of Phoenix, Arizona on October 25, President Joe Biden fulfilled a long-delayed promise to visit Indian country and called the boarding school system a “sin on our soul,” adding there was “no excuse” for how long-overdue the acknowledgement was and that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy. But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

The timing of the visit has also been noted as a tactic in the swing state to woo Native voters to cast votes for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. But many Native Americans are frustrated by government inaction to adequately protect lands, provide access to quality education and healthcare, and enact an arms embargo against Israel.

TOP PHOTO: A protester holds a sign as US President Joe Biden speaks at the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community, in Laveen Village, near Phoenix, Arizona on October 25, 2024. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images)

Survivors and descendants both acknowledge how meaningful Biden’s speech was after centuries of fighting for recognition from the federal government, and call on the administration to act swiftly on the apology.

“In his last two weeks in office, we demand that President Biden also pass S.1723/H.R.7227: The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act,” said the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit that has worked with survivors and Tribal leaders for over a decade to educate about the system and facilitate repatriations.

The legislation would provide a path for investing in language and culture revitalization efforts, educating the American public on the system via museums or curricula, and establishing trauma-informed mental health resources.

It would also enable subpoenas to be used to investigate the scale of the system: Catholic entities have been able to hold onto private records for decades, some of which contain the only known photographs or remnants of survivors’ ancestors. Reintroduced in both the Senate and House last year, the bill has yet to reach a vote.

The mental and physical health concerns of survivors and lack of widespread reconciliation reached national spotlight earlier this year when the Interior Department released its final investigative report on the system, which revealed at least 1,000 Indigenous children died or were killed. The schools operated using over $23 billion federal dollars, adjusted for inflation.

Left: Portrait of Justin Shedee (Apache) from 1889 (Cumberland County Historical Society) Right: Letter from Justin Shedee expressing his wish to leave Carlisle (National Archives and Records Administration via Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

Thousands were subject to child labor to operate facilities and be “outed,” working without wage for white families near the schools.

Angelique Albert, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and chief executive of the nation’s largest direct scholarship provider for Native students, Native Forward, referred to the boarding schools not as places of education but as places of “extermination.”

Just as slavery was used as the tool to harm Black people across the Americas, “education was the tool to harm us, to assimilate us. That’s the tool where we lost our children,” Albert said, adding that the apology is a testament to the work done by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American cabinet member and former recipient of their scholarships, to unearth survivor testimony and investigate the system.

“She’s in the very position that implemented the boarding schools. Do you understand? It gives me chills,” Albert said, emphasizing how critical it is for the federal government to maintain close relationships with Tribal nations and put more funding behind college access for Native youth so their voices can be heard in positions they’ve been historically excluded from.

While the apology, however late, is a “critical first step in the truth and reconciliation process for Native and Indigenous communities,” Albert stressed, “Indian boarding school policies are not a horror of the past — these institutions operated through 1969, and many Native people who were subjected to these cruel policies are still living today.”

Shower in the girls dorm on the Blackfoot Reservation, Cutbank Boarding School (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Morrow, May 1951)

The boarding school system, while the focus of President Biden’s remarks, was not the only widespread, forced removal of Native children. Throughout the 60s and 70s, over a third were removed from their families and overwhelmingly placed in non-Indian homes after discriminatory welfare investigations.

In Washington, Native children were placed in foster care and adopted at rates 19 times greater than their peers. The practice was widespread until 1978’s Indian Child Welfare Act was passed by Congress, who stated “wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today.”

Native populations now face disproportionately poor health outcomes, including the highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, which researchers have linked to centuries of genocide, disinvestment and generational trauma.

Following Biden’s address, an Indigenous collective gathered to pray, mourn, sing and push for more action in South Dakota, on the lands of what will soon be the Oceti Sakowin Community Academy, a “culture-based school” for Lakota, Dakota and Nakota children.

“Tonight, we took to the land and reminded the world that we are the children of survivors … We will honor our ancestors by holding this country accountable for what it has done to our people,” NDN Collective president Nick Tilsen said in a release. “The U.S. government tried to exterminate and erase us. We will continue to remind them they have failed at doing so, and the warrior spirit of our ancestors lives in all of us.”

SOURCE: https://www.yahoo.com/news/native-american-leaders-call-again-163000761.html

One word not found in President Biden’s apology is "domination" 

But instead of acknowledging the U.S. government’s ongoing claim of a right of domination over Native nations, Biden’s remarks made it seem as if all of that ended a long time ago. It’s called “A Lie of Omission” by leaving it unmentioned and out of focus. (How funny that the word “mission” is embedded in the word “omission”).

OP-ED: https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/on-bidens-recent-apology-for-the

They are finally HOME

Oglala children, Native boarding school victims laid to rest in weekend-long ceremony

The remains of three Oglala Lakota students who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1890s were returned home this month and reburied in their South Dakota homelands

The casket of Samuel Flying Horse is carried out of a ceremonial tipi by Tayton Kills Small, left, and Rodney Rouillard at Pahin Sinte Owayawa School in Porcupine, S.D., on Sept. 21, 2024, during a memorial service that was held for Fannie Charging Shield , Samuel Flying Horse, and James Cornman.

 By Charles Fox / ICT News |

September 29, 2024

 This article is free to access.

OGLALA, S.D. — As darkness descended, the procession to rebury Samuel Flying Horse (also known as Tasunke Kinyela) made its way along a dirt road to the Brave Blue Horse Family Cemetery outside of Oglala, S.D., on Sunday, Sept. 22. The memorial service and community gathering had run behind schedule and now the blue skies that marked the day and golden light of the setting sun were gone.

Corrine Brave looks over the casket of her relative, Samuel Flying Horse, in Oglala, S.D., on Sept. 22, 2024. Samuel was one of three Oglala Lakota students disinterred and returned to their homeland from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania.

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

Samuel died as a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and waited 131 years to be disinterred and returned to his homeland. Those gathered were not about to let darkness make him wait longer.

Approximately 20 vehicles in an open field encircled and directed their headlights on the small fenced-in cemetery. The pounding of the drum, the singing of songs, and prayers drifted up as pinpoints of starlight began dotting the night sky. Eventually, a group of men lowered Samuel’s casket, covered in a star quilt and a bouquet of red roses, into the ground. Samuel was now part of the land he had left behind in 1891.

Along with Fannie Charging Shield and James Cornman, Sameul was reburied on the Pine Ridge Reservation this past weekend. Fannie and James were buried at St. Julius Cemetery in Porcupine on Saturday, following a community gathering at the Pahin Sinte Owayawa School to celebrate the homecoming of the three Oglala Lakota students. Samuel was reburied the following day.

They died in the early 1890s as students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally run, off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans. Approximately 8,000 Native American students attended the school in a misguided attempt at forceful assimilation into white civilization by cutting all links in their cultural chain. It became the model for more than 400 schools across 37 states and territories in the U.S. and provided a blueprint for Canada’s notorious residential school system.

The three students were among the estimated 232 students who died during its years of operation from 1879 to 1918. Each passed from tuberculosis, then called consumption. It was the leading cause of death at the Carlisle school.

The dream

It wasn’t until the three students came home to Pine Ridge a week earlier that Corrine Brave, 70, checked her family tree and realized she was a relative of Samuel Flying Horse, who school records indicate was an orphan. With some trepidation, she stepped forward to claim Samuel and offer a burial site.

Vee Janis, left, a relative of Fannie Charging Shield, and Corrine Brave, a relative of Samuel Flying Horse, hug during a memorial service at Pahin Sinte Owayawa School in Porcupine, S.D., on Sept. 21, 2024. The remains of Fannie Charging Shield, Samuel Flying Horse, and James Cornman were returned from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania and reburied on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota.

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

As the mourners gathered, illuminated by the headlights of the surrounding cars, Corrine Brave told the gathering the story of a dream she had had the night before. A figure of a man descended a steep series of steps toward her. He kept slipping and falling, appearing to be legless. She could not make out the features of his face, but his voice was distinct. As he got closer, he said “wopilayelo” (the male version of thank you) to her four times. She felt the man was Samuel.

The dream woke her.

“I sat straight up, looked around thinking I was hearing things,” she recalled. “Then I said to myself, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ … So that's when I knew I was doing the right thing for my relative,” Brave said.

“It was for love – the love of my relatives, the love of my family. … I just really felt that in my heart that there was a relationship between us.” She began to think of herself in the role of an auntie.

He was buried beside his namesake, her late brother Samuel Brave.

The 'peaceful war'

The weekend’s ceremonies started Saturday morning when a convoy of nearly 25 cars made their way from Pine Ridge through the rolling hills. It traveled along the Chief Bigfoot Highway past the Wounded Knee Massacre site. It was a morning to celebrate and memorialize the three students.

The movement to repatriate the remains of students from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania began in 2015, when the Sicangu Youth Council of the Rosebud Sioux stopped at Carlisle following an event in Washington, D.C. It began with the simple question “Why aren’t we doing something to bring them home?” Justin Pourier, right, blesses former youth council members (left to right): Chris Eagle Bear, Jayden Whiting, and Rachel Janis on Sept. 21, 2024, at Pahin Sinte Owayawa School in Porcupine, S.D. where a memorial service was held for Fannie Charging Shield , Samuel Flying Horse, and James Cornman.

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

Fannie, James and Samuel left home for Carlisle in the name of education. The students did not realize they were taking part in a “peaceful war,” one fought in the classroom using education as the ammunition to force assimilation and cultural destruction. Books and blackboards were deemed a cheaper solution to “the Indian problem” than bullets and battlefields.

The school, located on a vacant U.S. Army base in Pennsylvania, was run in a military fashion. It was only fitting that upon their return they be memorialized in a school, Pahin Sinte Owayawa, in Porcupine, S.D.

It was the graduation day they had not lived to see.

The three caskets were carried into the school gym and placed in ceremonial tipis. About 100 community members and students sat in folding chairs and bleachers. They gathered to gain knowledge from all the students had endured over a century before by traversing 1,500 miles across the country to a school that had all intentions of erasing their culture. The trio of students and their experiences had become the teachers. Courage, perseverance and overcoming adversity were their subjects. It was their time to be honored.

“They were innocent, and they were raised right. And when they went to Carlisle, their parents got them ready,” Pat Janis, a medicine man and relative of Fannie Charging Shield, had said the previous day in an interview with ICT. “They said, ‘This is a different way than we live, but you got to go forward. You got to learn these things. This is the way we're going to live now. So you got to have strength. You got to have courage and do your best. Get educated. You're going to help us.’ So they prepared them. Although those students didn't want to go there … they took it as a warrior. … They said, ‘I'm scared. I don't know what this is, but my parents believe in me, and they want me to move forward into this way of life. I'm not selling out our people.’”

A question becomes a movement

The movement to repatriate the remains of students from the Carlisle cemetery began in 2015, when the Sicangu Youth Council of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe stopped at Carlisle following an youth event in Washington, D.C. It began with the simple question no one had thought to ask in earnest before, “Why aren’t we doing something to bring them home?”

A group of Lakota motorcyclists from Washington state lead a convey of approximately 25 vehicles along Chief Big Foot Highway (Highway 27) on their way to Porcupine, S.D., on Sept. 21, 2024. The convey was part of a memorial services for Fannie Charging Shield , Samuel Flying Horse, and James Cornman, whose remains had been returned from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania.

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

The question ultimately led the Office of Army Cemeteries to begin the process of returning students’ remains to their tribal communities. Since 2017, the Office of Army Cemeteries – which oversees the Carlisle cemetery along with other military gravesites, including Arlington Cemetery – has disinterred and returned the remains of 32 children from the school’s cemetery. Still, 146 students have yet to be returned to their tribes prior to this fall’s disinterment.

Three former members of the Sicangu Youth Council, Chris Eagle Bear, Rachel Janis, and Jayden Whiting, were recognized and honored at the memorial service for initiating the return of Carlisle students.

“You know, 10 years later, I didn't expect to be where we are today. Because at the end of the day, we were just kids with a curious question,” said Chris Eagle Bear, 26, who is currently a Rosebud Sioux Tribe councilman.

“My generation is the first generation that is not a part of the boarding school era. And with that, we're able to share what we feel. We're able to speak on matters that a lot of our people couldn't speak on for a long time because they were scared,” Eagle Bear said. “The older generation started sharing their stories, started sharing things that they've never shared before with anyone.”

Janis called the relatives of the three students forward for a ceremony of healing and compassion near the end of the event.

“We are still in mourning over it. It's a good thing that we can get over it now, because sometimes we walk around with sadness and mourning, and we don't even know we're in mourning ’til we get a physical sickness like diabetes,” he said.

For Justin Pourier, the Oglala Sioux Tribal Historical Preservation Officer, who had gone to Carlisle and accompanied them on their homecoming, there was the satisfaction of a mission accomplished. He often thought of all they had endured and felt a love and an attachment to the three students.

Michael Littlevoice, a Ponca and Omaha man from Ponca City, Okla., plays the flute in front of the casket of Samuel Flying Horse. Littlevoice felt compelled to attend the event to help the community heal and celebrate. The words of his song are: “After all of these years, I'm home, I'm home. I'm home after all these years.”

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

Yet, there was so much more work to be done. Pourier thought about other Oglala Lakota children who remain buried at other boarding school cemeteries and artifacts in the possession of museums and academic institutions. He spoke at the event of the Oglala Lakota students buried at the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker-run, Native American residential school in Wabash, Ind.,which was initially established by Quaker missionaries in 1862. And he talked about his hope to continue to have artifacts, such as war bonnets and moccasins with beautiful beadwork, returned from various museums to a place where Native youths could draw inspiration and pride in the beautiful craftsmanship.

“If they can see all these things, it reestablishes their pride and their sense of knowing who they are. I’m hoping it brings healing, and helps our children grow back into the strong nation we used to be,” Pourier had said while in Carlisle. “We can't afford to send a busload of kids all the way to New York to look at something that should be back home.”

Mourners bury the remains of Samuel Flying Horse — a Lakota student who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1893 — near Oglala, S.D., on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024.

Charles Fox / Special to ICT

As the morning of speeches and prayers came to a close Saturday, Michael Littlevoice, a Ponca and Omaha man living in Ponca City, Okla., asked permission to address the crowd. He had attended Chilocco Indian Agricultural School with Orville Flying Horse of McIntosh, S.D., in the early 1970s. He felt compelled to attend the two events to help the community heal and celebrate.

He performed an original composition on his flute inspired by the occasion. The haunting yet peaceful music echoed through the room, setting the mood for the reburial that would follow shortly, the ending to the long and unfortunate journey home of Fannie, Samuel and James. While he performed as an instrumental, he informed those gathered of the words:

“After all of these years, I'm home, I'm home. I'm home after all these years.”

This story was originally published on ICTNews.org.

https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/south-dakota/oglala-children-native-boarding-school-victims-laid-to-rest-in-weekend-long-ceremony

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