News Release
Catawba Nation
Catawba Nation citizens Susan George and Pat Threatt led the successful effort to return the remains of a Catawba child buried on-site at the Carlisle Army War College (formerly the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School) in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Wade Ayers passed away in 1904 while attending the Carlisle boarding school and has been interred at the school cemetery ever since. Because of the efforts of Ms. George and Ms. Threatt, Wade’s closest living relative, his remains will be coming home on June 23, 2022, to the Catawba ancestral homelands after 118 years. The Catawba tribal family will hold a homecoming ceremony on June 25, 2022, when the family will reinter Wade’s remains at a church cemetery near the Catawba Nation.
Catawbas have known that one of their own rested in a cemetery at the boarding school in Pennsylvania but were never quite sure how to reclaim the young boy’s remains. Finally, in 2017, the Northern Arapaho Tribe became the first tribe to repatriate their children from the Carlisle Army Barracks. This is where George stepped in after repeated visits to the barracks, the last in 2018. Susan George and Brooke M. Bauer began researching how Wade Ayers’ body could be returned to his family, people, and homeland. George learned that only Wade’s immediate descendant, Ms. Pat Threatt, his niece and oldest relative, could request the repatriation of his body. According to Army regulations, the request for repatriation had to come from the family, not the tribal government. Susan and Pat sent in the formal request to return the body of Wade Ayers to his family. In January 2022, Susan received confirmation that Wade’s body would be returned at the expense of the Army.
Wade Ayers’ time at Carlisle was particularly tragic and traumatic. His parents, Jefferson Davis Ayers and Harriet “Lucinda” Berry Ayers, sent him to the school in August 1903. Wade traveled by train with Moroni George (19) to the school in Pennsylvania, arriving on August 30. Wade was 13-years old when he arrived. Wade’s school intake form fails to indicate any health issues, but on January 14, 1904, he died from “vaccine fever,” probably an influenza vaccination. An obituary ran in the school’s newspaper that read, “Wade Ayers, Catawba, of South Carolina, was laid to rest last Sunday. He was a boy of lovable disposition and with a keen sense of justice and right. After vaccination he took cold in his arm, which with serious complications ended his life.” Memorial services were held at the school where he was buried, never to see his parents and homeland again. Wade’s story is only one of the hundreds of heartbreaking stories of Native American children who died at the school and never returned to their people and homeland. Still, the Catawba tribal family celebrates his return home this month. Wade will finally rest with his relatives in the land that once belonged to his people.
Twelve Catawba children were sent to the boarding school in Carlisle from 1893 to 1918. The children included Charlotte Harris, Rosa Harris, Edith Harris, Artemis Harris, Lavinia Harris, Joseph Sanders, Wade Ayers, Moroni George, Mary Ayers, Fred Nelson Blue, Hester Catherine Harris, and Beulah George.
Written by Catawba Nation citizen and historian Brooke M. Bauer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
