Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

The U.S. Army is set to commence its sixth disinterment project aimed at repatriating the remains of five Indigenous children who passed away over a hundred years ago. The goal is to reunite them with their modern-day families and communities.

The identified students are Edward Upright of the Spirit Lake Tribe in North Dakota; Amos LaFramboise from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota; Beau Neal of the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming; Edward Spott of the Puyallup Tribe in Washington; and Launy Shorty of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana.

These children represent a fraction of approximately 200 who lost their lives under government care from 1880 to 1910 while enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a central institution for Indian education at the time.

In 1879, the then Carlisle Barracks was transformed into the inaugural Indian boarding school in the nation, operated by the Department of the Interior until 1918. Over its 39-year span, it sought to forcibly integrate 7,800 Native American children from over 140 tribal nations using Western education and labor. Tragically, around 200 children from 59 tribes succumbed, often to illnesses exacerbated by inadequate living conditions and mistreatment. Their final resting place was the school’s grounds.

The area that once held the Indian Boarding School, including its cemetery, is now overseen by the United States Army War College, which houses the remains of over 190 Indigenous children.

The journey to repatriate started in 2017 at the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery. Yufna Soldier Wolf, representing the Northern Arapaho Tribe, succeeded in a decade-long endeavor to repatriate three Arapaho children, eventually reinterred in Ethete, Wyoming.

Since then, the Army has repatriated 28 children through five different disinterment operations. These initiatives, each lasting around a month during summer, are spearheaded by a specialist team from the Army Corps of Engineers’ Center of Expertise for Curation. They handle the meticulous and lengthy process of exhumation and identification.

The current disinterment operation is expected to span roughly ten days, as mentioned in the Army’s press release.

For the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe of South Dakota, this return concludes a 145-year-long wait.

Back in 1879, two young Oyate boys, Edward Upright from the Spirit Lake Nation and Amos LaFromboise from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, journeyed from the Dakotas to the Carlisle school. Both were sons of influential tribal figures—Amos, the offspring of Joseph LaFromboise, a foundational leader of his tribe, and Edward, son of Chief Waanatan. Destined to become hereditary chiefs, their lives were cut short, and they remained interred at the school’s cemetery.

The tribe’s historian, Tamara St. John, has delved deep into the histories of her tribe’s ancestors interred at Carlisle for over six years. This research is culminating in the upcoming return of the Oyate boys, an event initially anticipated last summer.

“I feel afraid of how much it’s going to hurt,” St. John told Native News Online in their earlier reporting. “I feel afraid for my community and the relatives because it will bring out pain and hurt. After that, I feel excited and happy that things are moving and progressing. And then I feel proud, really proud of our families and our tribes and how we just connected and embraced each other in this and in this difficult thing.”