19 Native children buried at Carlisle Indian School over a century ago are finally being returned to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.
Boarding schools removed children from their families, sending them hundreds or thousands of miles away to be stripped of culture and identity.
My great-great-grandmother Carrie was exploited by Carlisle’s superintendent, sent home pregnant, and lost her stillborn son; her sister Lillie vanished into the system.
Repatriation is not just about remains, it’s truth-telling about abuse, erasure, and generational trauma.
Each return is a sacred act of healing, bringing our children home and ensuring their stories are never forgotten.
This week brought news that would have seemed impossible just decades ago: 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. These children, whose remains will be returned to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma, represent just a fraction of the thousands of Native children who died far from home at federal Indian boarding schools.
Their homecoming is both a victory and a heartbreaking reminder of what was lost. They were taken as children, carried hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and laid to rest in foreign soil that was not their own. For over a century, they became part of an earth that did not belong to them culturally, spiritually, or ancestrally. Now, generations later, they are being brought home completing journeys interrupted by violence and assimilation.
“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”
The Indian boarding school system, which operated from the 1870s through 1996, was designed with an explicit mission captured in the infamous phrase: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Children as young as five were forcibly removed from their families, shipped across the country, and placed in institutions where their hair was cut, their languages forbidden, and their ceremonies outlawed. They were renamed, punished for speaking their mother tongues, and trained for menial labor instead of education.
The most notorious of these institutions was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Carlisle became the blueprint for over 350 other schools, shaping a system of cultural genocide that spread across the nation.
The cost was staggering. Research to date has documented at least 973 child burials across 65 schools and surrounding communities, though the true number is likely far higher. Many children’s deaths were never reported; many graves remain unmarked.
My Family’s Story: The King Sisters
The statistics and records tell one part of the story, but the lived experiences of families reveal the human cost of these institutions. My own family’s history with Carlisle illustrates both trauma and survival.
My great-great-grandmother, Ay Un Dus, was forced to attend Carlisle in 1910. Upon arrival she was stripped of her identity and renamed “Caroline” or “Carrie” King. Her sister Taybusegeshig was renamed “Lillian” or “Lillie” King. Both had already endured the Episcopal-run White Earth Boarding School in Minnesota before being shipped even farther east to Pennsylvania.
Carrie quickly came under the attention of Carlisle’s superintendent, Moses Friedman. Records show that she was considered “favored” by him, a status that masked something far darker. Evidence from her letters suggests they were engaged in a sexual relationship. In several letters, she signed her words to Friedman as “I am yours, lovingly, Caroline King.”
In 1913, Carrie became pregnant. She was abruptly sent home, and within months gave birth to a stillborn child she named Peter. Around the same time, Friedman was investigated by Congress for misconduct, though the investigation was swiftly dropped and he was reinstated. The trauma of that time followed Carrie for the rest of her life, a wound carried forward through the generations.
Lillie’s story is even more tragic. She struggled with health and academics at Carlisle, visiting the school doctor more than 50 times. She briefly returned home with Carrie in June 1913, but re-enrolled at Carlisle later that year. After that, she disappeared from the record entirely. No death notice, no grave, no closure. She was simply gone, one of the countless Native children who vanished into the system.
My family’s story echoes thousands of others. It is a reminder that “assimilation” was not an abstract policy, it was intimate, violent, and devastatingly personal.
The Sacred Work of Repatriation
Today’s repatriation efforts are not just about returning bones to tribal lands. They are sacred acts of healing.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990 and strengthened by new federal regulations in 2024, provides tribes with greater authority to reclaim ancestral remains and sacred items from museums and federal institutions. For tribes, each return represents a spiritual restoration, ensuring children who died far from home can finally rest in their ancestral homelands.
But the work of repatriation also forces us to confront the full reality of what boarding schools were. These institutions were not only places of cultural erasure, they were places of violence. Many children endured systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of those charged with “civilizing” them. My great-great-grandmother’s story at Carlisle, where the superintendent exploited her as a young teenager, is only one example of the exploitation that was widespread but rarely acknowledged.
When children are brought home, ceremonies honor not only their lives, but also the silenced stories of abuse and exploitation they endured. Repatriation acknowledges these truths openly, giving families the chance to grieve what was taken while affirming the dignity of the children who never returned.
Every homecoming, every prayer spoken over a traditional and sacred burial ground, is both a restoration and a reckoning. It is the return of a child to their people, and a refusal to allow their suffering to remain buried in silence.
Truth-Telling and Accountability
While the Department of the Interior briefly launched a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the most consistent work of research, documentation, and advocacy is now led by Native-led organizations. Particularly, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). Their research and resources continue to uncover the scale of loss and provide critical tools for truth-telling, education, and policy change (boardingschoolhealing.org).
This work matters because the scars are still with us. Boarding school policies tore apart families, disrupted cultural transmission, and left intergenerational trauma that Native communities live with today. Naming, documenting, and repatriating is how we begin to stitch together the fabric of what was broken.
The Ongoing Journey
The Army continues to hold the remains of nearly 150 Native children at Carlisle, and tribes are fighting for their return. Beyond Carlisle, unmarked graves remain scattered across former school grounds nationwide. Legal, cultural, and spiritual battles continue to bring each child home.
Repatriation is slow, painstaking, and often met with resistance from institutions that still hold Native remains and cultural items. Yet every ceremony marks progress, a reminder that these children are not forgotten, and their stories will not remain buried.
Healing Across Generations
The return of these 19 children to Oklahoma is more than historical correction, it is a message to survivors, descendants, and the world: Our children are coming home.
For families like mine, who lost sisters, brothers, and grandparents to the boarding school system, these homecomings are sacred. They speak to resilience, survival, and the enduring bonds of kinship.
The boarding school era cannot be undone. But we can confront its legacy with honesty, accountability, and the sacred work of repatriation. Each child who comes home carries not just their own spirit, but the memory of all who were lost.
As these children are laid to rest in the embrace of their homelands, we are reminded that healing is possible, but only if we continue to tell the truth, honor the dead, and fight for justice for the living.
For more resources, history, and ongoing repatriation efforts, visit the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition at boardingschoolhealing.org.