Many months ago, my romantic partner--a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate elder--and I attended a signing ceremony that was a step in bringing home Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright, Dakota boys who had died at the notorious Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania. Here's the February 2022 post SWO moves closer to bringing ancestors home from Carlisle Indian School with affidavit signing ceremony.
They were buried in Pennsylvania, away from their families and communities.
The tribal worked long before the signing ceremony to bring the ancestors home. Now they're returning, with the respect due them and their families.
At Indian Country Today on Friday, Mary Annette Pember and Stewart Huntington reported in Tribes strike historic deal with Army over repatriations:
Native ceremonies and sovereignty will guide the return of ancestors buried at the Carlisle school.
It took nearly 150 years, but Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright will soon return home in the manner of chiefs, guided by their sovereign nations.
In an unprecedented move this week, the U.S. Army made concessions long sought by tribes over the disinterment and repatriation, in time for repatriations of five students who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial school in the late 19th century.
Previous repatriations from Carlisle’s cemetery were handled under Army protocol, which restricted Indigenous ceremonies and specified that remains be handed over only to next of kin.
The new agreement allows the remains of LaFromboise from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe of South Dakota and Upright from the Spirit Lake Tribe in North Dakota to be turned over to the care of their tribes and families, and spells out numerous times during the disinterment and repatriation processes for the tribes to "perform any requisite ceremonies."
In addition to other concessions, the Army agreed to provide two buffalo robes for the remains of the two boys as well as firewood for a sweat lodge that will be built on the cemetery grounds.
The agreement was signed in a special ceremony with tribal leaders on Wednesday, Sept. 13, and the disinterments for the two boys are set to begin Sunday, Sept. 17.
“The signing ceremony is a symbol of the six-year battle to bring our children home,” Tamara St. John, a Sisseton tribal citizen and archivist for the tribe’s Historic Preservation Office, told ICT.
“This has been a fight for sovereignty for us as a sovereign nation to be able to take control of this process, to do things the way we know they need to be done guided by our protocols, our spirituality, in order to bring our children home with honor.” . . .
Army regulations
Leaders from Sisseton and other tribes have objected for years to the restrictive Army policies, arguing instead that the rules of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, known as NAGPRA, should guide the proceedings.
NAGPRA provides a process for federal agencies and museums that receive federal funds to repatriate human remains and other cultural items to lineal descendants and to tribes. The Army insists that the NAGPRA statute doesn’t apply to them. Attorneys from the Native American Rights Fund, which is representing Sisseton, sent a letter in March to the Office of Army Cemeteries saying the statute does, indeed, apply. . . .
The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake tribes have been working for six years to bring LaFromboise and Upright home.
The Sisseton Wahpeton and Spirit Lake tribes are one family, according to St. John, though the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate is in South Dakota and the Spirit Lake Tribe is in North Dakota.
“We are under the same treaty of Feb. 19, 1867, and our battle has been to be able to do things together in the way that we know that we need to do with our spirituality,” she said. . . .
Repatriations at Carlisle
LaFromboise was the first student to die at the notorious Carlisle school.
Part of the initial group of Indigenous youths taken to Carlisle, he arrived on Nov. 6, 1879, and died 20 days later on Nov. 26. Newspaper reports at the time suggest that he was already ill when he arrived at the school. He was 13.
Col. Richard Pratt, superintendent of Carlisle, traveled to the Plains states in 1879 to recruit students for the school’s first class. He gathered about 200 students who traveled in several groups to the school.
Children who were part of that first class in 1879 were considered the best and brightest among their communities; their recruitment was also viewed as a means to keep the Plains tribes from resisting government control, according to St. John.
“The fathers of these children are chiefs or leading men in their tribes,” Pratt wrote in an 1879 letter to E.H. Hoyt, the commissioner of Indian affairs, noting later that “as training and development of their children goes forward, family and friends will be restrained by that fact and also seek for themselves a better state of civilization.”
Upright, from Spirit Lake, was part of the same group as LaFromboise and died in May 1881 at age 12. According to school archives kept by Dickinson College, he died from pneumonia while recovering from measles. . . .
In May, the Office of Army Cemeteries posted a notice indicating another round of disinterments from the Carlisle school cemetery would take place in September.
U.S. government officials praised the agreement, saying it was an honor to return the children to their homelands.
“We are grateful for the trust that the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake Tribe have placed in the Office of Army Cemeteries to return their children,” said Renea Yates, director of the Army cemeteries office. “We look forward to working with the tribes as we send Amos and Edward home, bringing some healing and closure they deserve.” . . .
St. John recalled the words of Sisseton elder and language speaker John Eagle regarding the importance of conducting the repatriations according to tribal customs and protocols.
“He said, ‘When you bring them home, you bring them home like the chiefs that they are; you bring them home in buffalo robes; you bring them home in honor, because they would have been our chiefs if they had lived,’” St. John said.
- On September 11, US Army began disinterment project to return remains of more children buried at Carlisle to tribal communities
- Update: Amos LaFramboise to be returned to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, Lake Traverse Reservation from Carlisle Indian School
- SWO archivist: "We are committed to them . . . to bringing them home like the chiefs that they are"
- SWO moves closer to bringing ancestors home from Carlisle Indian School with affidavit signing ceremony
- Video: Return of Our Sisseton-Wahpeton Children
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