Army returning 19 Native boarding school children to their families

Beginning September 1, 2025, staff working with the Office of Army Cemeteries began the somber work of trying to repatriate 19 Native Americans to their home tribes and closest descendants. All the youths died in the custody of the U.S. government while attending the former Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School.

The school operated from 1879 through 1918, enrolling more than 10,000 Native American children with representation from approximately 50 tribes. It was the first, the largest, and the model for a network of Native boarding schools operated as part of a government-funded program aimed at assimilating Native Americans into the majority society.

Intergenerational trauma directly and indirectly created by the genocidal boarding school policy continues to echo among Native Americans all over Turtle Island (North America). The disinterment and repatriation are part of what some Native Americans describe as a larger effort to heal from the dislocation, trauma and cultural genocide the boarding schools have come to represent.

Cheyenne and Arapaho Governor Reggie Wasanna said he couldn’t imagine the pain their parents and others like them must have felt.

“It would be very tough for someone just to watch their kid taken and then the fact that you don’t know if [and] how they died,” he said during a phone interview. “Those kids that may have been out there on some other foreign land… where they weren’t really welcomed as true tribal members… and so bringing them home to our traditional and historical homelands is kind of important part of allowing some of this to rest.”

Wasanna said the tribal nation plans to bury them at an internment cemetery in Concho.

This year’s is the largest group to be moved to date in the U.S. Army’s 8-year effort to offer repatriation of all the former Carlisle students whose descendants desire it. The repatriation of this year’s children is scheduled to run through October 13.

Renea Yates from the Office of Army Cemeteries commented, “The team takes each individual child personally and to see the families and tribes be able to receive their children and take them back to their Native lands is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career.”

In announcing its plan for this summer, the Army said the target group includes 18 members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, many of whom died of health-related illnesses, such as tuberculosis.

Indigenous children in Oklahoma were forced to travel more than 1,000 miles away from all they had ever known to receive a so-called “American education” at Carlisle. Among those scheduled for return to their homelands this summer is Charles White Shield and his brother Mark, also a student at Carlisle.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho also hope to reunite with Nannie Little Robe, who arrived at the boarding school as a 12-year-old in 1886 and died there, still separated from her family, at age 18.

Seminole Nation of Oklahoma leaders will also bring one of their relatives home. Wallace Perryman was 20 years old when he walked on at Carlisle. He died following an abdominal abscess operation, according to correspondences from leaders at Carlisle and the Department of the Interior.

Perryman’s bodily remains were inadvertently discovered on the grounds decades after the cemetery was established, making him one of the last students to be buried there.

The disinterment program has seen multiple Native American tribes, including Lakota, travel to Carlisle to reclaim loved ones buried there. To date, the Army has returned 41 children to families and tribes. Currently, 135 marked student graves remain at the small Post Cemetery off Claremont Road.

(Contact Grace Terry at grace@angelsabide.com)

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