WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
Charles Fox
Special to ICT
LAKE TRAVERSE RESERVATION, S.D. — On the day of the reburial, a fire glowed in the darkness that shrouded the seven teepees on the repatriation grounds.
Stones were heated for the two inipi and songs drifted into the night air. The sky began to lighten, changing in color from charcoal to ash.
Fog soon moved into the area, setting a somber mood as a group of women carried the remains of six ancestors from a teepee to be placed on scaffolding, repeating the ritual that had taken place for three days.
The emotions were evident. It was the final day to say goodbye. The Dakota people had waited a long time for this day. But no one had waited longer or endured more than Amos LaFromboise.
Amos had been away from his homeland for 144 years. In the interim, he had been exhumed three times, been part of a cemetery controversy and a cemetery relocation. Now, for his fourth burial, he finally would be home.
Early in the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 23, Amos, a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate boy who died at just 13 years old, was buried in the tribal repatriation cemetery on the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. With the Prairie Cocteau Hills rising above and the valley stretching out below, he was buried beside his former schoolmate, Edward Upright, of the Spirit Lake Tribe.
The two boys had been among an ill-fated group of six Dakota students from Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake who had come to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania on Nov. 6, 1879. The school had been in existence exactly one month.
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In 20 days, Amos was dead — the first student to die at the school. There is no record of the case of death, though a newspaper report at the time suggested he was sick when he arrived at the school.
Upright lived about 18 months at the school before dying at age 13. They both were buried far from home for more than 100 years, returning only now to their homelands as part of the U.S. Army’s disinterment project from Carlisle Barracks.
“I always felt that we, as kids, no matter what boarding school, that we weren’t really recognized as even human. We were just there,” said Bob LaFromboise, a relative of Amos and a boarding school survivor himself.
“But for Amos, he dies way away from home, way over there. We live way over here. And it’s time to bring him home and show him respect and love that he should have had and never had. And who knows what happened over there? Because those stories about him are unclear. We just know that he died. That’s it.”
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Tribal members, family and others spoke to ICT about the disinterment and reburial process, though ICT agreed ahead of time not to photograph the ceremonies or other sensitive items.
Edward, son of Chief Waanatan II, was only 12 when he arrived at the school. He was a year younger than Amos, and died on May 5, 1881, of pneumonia as he was recovering from the measles.
Amos and Edward were among five students disinterred from Carlisle in September, including Beau Neal, who was returned to the Northern Arapaho, and Launey Shorty, returned to the Blackfeet Nation.
Another student, Edward Spott, Puyallup, was set to have been returned to his tribe and family in Washington state. Although his descendants were present in Carlisle for the disinterment, officials discovered the remains in the grave were that of an unidentified female about 15-20 years of age. Those remains were reburied in a grave marked as unknown.
A string of deaths
Only two students among the six survived, with two more dying in the months after Amos’s death. John Renville, who was 14 when he arrived with the group, died Aug. 10, 1880, after contracting typhus, a disease spread by bacteria in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. But in an unusual move, Chief Gabriel Renville was allowed to bring his son home for burial.
John’s sister Nancy, also a student, left the school for her brother’s burial with the promise to return, but she never did. Years later, she cited her family’s economic situation and the need to help on the home front as her reasons for not returning.
The final male member of the group, George Walker, was sent home in April 1883 after becoming ill at the school. He died soon afterwards in South Dakota.
Amos’s sister, Justine LaFromboise, the sixth member of the group, is the only one who completed her term at Carlisle. There are no records of Justine expressing her feelings about the school or her brother’s death.
“People always wonder why Justine didn’t say anything,” said Angeline Wanna, a tribal archivist, who is related to both Amos and Edward. “And in my heart, I believe it was just something too hard for her to talk about. Her brother died there and wasn’t allowed to return home. And she had to stay there still and go to school and be strong for her and for her family.”
Amos and Edward were reburied along with four other remains that were turned over to the tribe for repatriation from other institutions.
Their long-awaited return helped their tribes win concessions from the U.S. Army that could help future ancestors finally receive honorable journeys home.
‘The circle of life’
About 40 people arrived in Carlisle from Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake tribes on Sept. 16 to begin the disinterment – a process that came precariously close to not taking place.
The two tribes had objected to the prescribed protocols of the Army and argued instead that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, should govern the process. They wanted the remains to be turned over to the tribe instead of the next of kin, who often are difficult to determine. The Army’s protocols allowed two relatives for each exhumed individual, a spiritual leader, and a tribal official.
The Army finally reached an agreement, allowing the tribe to designate a next-of-kin, and allowing the performance of ceremonies, including the building of a sweat lodge on a remote piece of off-base Army property. The Army also agreed to purchase two buffalo robes for the remains so the boys could be returned as the sons of chiefs, as they were.
“Who has say over people with so much unhealed trauma and wounds from boarding school and separation, and the devastation of everything that happened to Indigenous nations?“ asked Tamara St. John, a tribal historian and South Dakota state representative.
“And they want to pin it on one person picked [to be] the keeper of it all,” she said. “There has been so much that happens under NAGPRA — the sharing of traditional knowledge being passed down generations. It unites us as communities and tribes and families. And it really is a beautiful thing and, you know, often in an impoverished tribal community, beautiful things are very lacking.”
The exhumation process began the following morning, Sunday, Sept. 17, with some tensions, however. The U.S. Office of Army Cemeteries seemed reluctant to include the entire group in the initial meeting before relenting.
“I said before we start anything we need to pray and put our hearts and minds together and put our prayers in the Chanunpa, our pipe, and ask the Creator to help us as we begin to do this,” said DelRay German, the keeper of the Sisseton Wahpeton Chanunpa and the firekeeper.
As work began in the cemetery, German set the Chanunpa on the ground under a large weeping cherry tree near Amos’s grave, where it remained throughout the day.
The light rain that started that day soon became a heavy deluge by mid-afternoon. In the Dakota tradition, it was viewed as a cleansing and a healing component, as the majority of the tribal group remained in the cemetery observing the work, some singing honor songs when remains were exposed.
The remains in Amos’s grave, however, were incomplete. Most of his skeletal remains were missing, with just a kneecap found in the grave, tribal officials said.
“When it came to Amos, there was next to nothing,” said St. John, who sat tearfully in the nearby tent. “I saw what I thought was the bottom of the casket. We have long thought there was the possibility of standing next to an empty grave. I hoped that would not happen….We have known from the beginning that this can be very painful work. In this instance, it’s really triggering for boarding school survivors.”
While it was not unusual to find partial remains, finding so little created anxiety. A forensic anthropologist blamed the intruding roots of the weeping cherry tree.
“I asked her about why there were few remains, and she said that nature has a process of oxygen, water, and plant life absorbing other living matter. Most of these individuals being young individuals with soft bone tissue still, their bones break down more quickly,” said DelRay German. “The circle of life.”
While little is known about Amos’ short time at the school, what happened after his death has been thoroughly documented.
Since the school was created on an Army base by school Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt, Amos was initially buried in a military plot created after the Battle of Gettysburg at nearby Ashland Cemetery.
Two months later, the adjunct general ruled the plot was deeded only for White soldiers, so Amos was exhumed and moved to a new cemetery on the school grounds. He was buried beside a Cheyenne student whom the school had renamed Abe Lincoln.
That would be his resting place until 1927, when the Army moved the cemetery to make room for development of what had become the Army Medical Field Service School.
The less-than-ideal handling of the move created a growing number of unknown graves in the so-called Indian Cemetery. At least three students have been found to be misidentified since 2017, and there are 17 unknown graves now in the cemetery.
‘He became my child’
In contrast, Edward’s remains as described by tribal members were nearly complete, bringing forth other emotions.
Dianne Desrosiers, the Sisseton Wahpeton tribal historic preservation officer, arrived the next morning at 7 a.m. to be present for the forensic examination of Edward.
“There was a six-foot-long box lined with red fabric,” she said. “And he was all laid out … I became emotional because it really hit home…I tried to imagine in my mind his face and his smile. …It was just the emotions and sadness that came over me. It’s still hard to talk about. He became real. He became a child; he became my child.”
She vowed then and there that she would not leave him as forensics tests were performed.
“I’m going to make sure that they do right by you because we’re taking you home,” she said. “It was kind of like a silent commitment.”
A day later, the Office of Army Cemeteries announced their findings to the tribe that in both cases the remains were biologically consistent for each young man. The conclusion provided comforting news about Amos, particularly.
“Even though it was just a little piece of him, it just still gave me that sense of knowing that he was with us,” Wanna said. “He still came home.”
The findings were accepted by the tribe.
The journey home
Following a last gathering in the cemetery to thank officials with the Office of Army Cemeteries and perform a dignified transfer ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 19, a nine-vehicle caravan began the 22-hour drive to Sisseton with stops only for gasoline, rest rooms, and to pick up the remains of two other ancestors being returned to the tribe.
A meeting and ceremony took place in the shadow of a harshly lit filling station at the Middle Ridge Service Plaza in Amherst, Ohio, with a professor and others from Oberlin College in Ohio. The remains belonged to two individuals originating from Ashton, South Dakota, and had been donated to the school by George Louis Williams, an Oberlin graduate and South Dakota itinerant preacher.
Two other remains would be waiting in Sisseton, both believed to be from more than 500 years ago, from the Fargo, North Dakota Coroner’s Office, though little information has been provided.
They would join the two boys in the repatriation cemetery on the Lake Traverse Reservation. The cemetery’s sloping hillside has approximately 2,200 sets of remains from locations such as the Smithsonian Institute and major U.S. universities.
The caravan continued on the journey, moving as one through the midwestern night to greet dawn near the Iowa-Nebraska border. In Peever, South Dakota, they merged with community vehicles waiting to accompany them on the final miles.
They were headed to the site of the old Sisseton Agency, where the youths would have said their last goodbyes to their parents before their journey to Carlisle.
They had left on a horse-drawn wagon, and a similar wagon waited to carry the caskets to the site behind the current powwow grounds.
Mixed emotions
As noon approached on Saturday, Sept. 23, the area was filled with cars and about 100 people of all ages stood on the hillside overlooking the open graves. There were elders who had experienced boarding schools firsthand, as well as children who could not comprehend how such a thing had been allowed to happen.
From the opening ceremony at sunrise, it was a day of mixed emotions.
“It was hard just because it was our final day with them,” said Angeline Wanna. “It was mostly happy tears to let them go, but at the same time it was really hard for me to let go because I’ve spent all this time researching them and trying to get to know them and their families and spending so much time with them on my mind, and now that day you have to let them go and not look back.”
The remains had been placed on wooden scaffolding at sunrise for three days to complete the four-day period of mourning, which had started with the transfer ceremony at Carlisle. The remains were then taken down and wrapped in buffalo robes along with a star quilt, moccasins, a medicine pouch, and traditional food by relatives for their spirit journey.
“I felt a lot of emotions during that time,” Wanna said. “I just pictured getting a 13-year-old boy ready on his journey to the spirit world. It was hard for me but at the same time, it was nice to see all of the stuff that people brought to send them home the way they would have been sent 144 years ago had they been sent home to their respective families.”
The bundles were then handed to a member of the Kit Fox Society standing in the graves as singers and drums heightened the intensity of the moment.
Toward the end of the program, Rachel Janis and Alexis White Hat of the Rosebud Sioux’s Sicangu Youth Council spoke to the crowd. The youth group’s efforts in 2016 had initiated the repatriations from Carlisle. Thirty-two students have now been returned home, but at least 146 Native student remains are still at Carlisle.
It had taken the youth to bring the youth home. Now there was added optimism that the efforts of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate would make the process with the Army easier and allow for tribal participation and traditional ceremonies the next time remains are disinterred.
‘We’re still here’
For many, the reburial was a funeral for the assimilation movement the Carlisle school had initiated. Despite all the efforts of the school and the federal government, they had failed. The culture, the ceremonies, the language survived.
“We’re still here, we still have our ways, our belief systems, our spirituality, our language, our culture, everything that we have fought for, everything that helped us to survive hundreds of years, since time immemorial,” Desrosiers said the morning after the ceremony.
“We’re still here. And we are seeing a resurgence of our ways, what’s important, and what we value as people — our cultural identity.”
At the conclusion of the burial, a farewell song was accompanied by a slow, steady drum beat. The spirits of those buried were released.
After those present smoked the Chanunpa, another drenching rain came. What had started in the rain in Carlisle had ended with the rain in Sisseton.
The rain had brought its healing touch once again.
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