Arapaho children making last trip home
The three boys made the trip together, nearly 2,000 miles from the grassy plains of Wyoming to a small town in central Pennsylvania. It was March 11, 1881.
Like the 10,000 other children who would eventually walk into the reconverted Army barracks as newcomers, the three were given haircuts. They were put into military uniforms. Pushed into marching regiments. Forbidden from speaking the language they had known all their lives.
Even their names were taken away.
Little Chief, Dickens Nor.
Horse, 11, was now Washington.
Little Plume, 9, Hayes Friday.
And within two years of arriving at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the three members of the Northern Arapaho tribe were dead. They were placed in a small cemetery 14, became Horace
was rechristened Vanderbilt that would come to hold nearly 200 other children from the school during its tenure from 1879 to 1918.
But now the three boys are also making the return trip together.
On Monday, U.S. Army personnel began digging up the graves of the three Northern Arapaho children, according to Philly.com. Fifteen members of the tribe — including direct relatives of the deceased — were on hand to witness the process, which is expected to continue into the week.
The return of the remains is a fitting epilogue to one of the uglier chapters in the history of U.S. government interaction with native tribes, a period when schools like Carlisle were used as tools to detach Native American youths from their cultures.
“It’s a long time coming,” Crawford White Sr., a Northern Arapaho elder, told the Pittsburgh PostGazette. “It’s something that had to be done for our tribe, and the healing begins.”