Army: Disinterred remains do not match Native American boy

The tombstone bore the name of Wade Ayres, a Native American boy who died at a government-run boarding school in Pennsylvania more than a century ago and was thought to have been buried on the grounds of what is now a U.S. Army base.

But when the Army exhumed grave B-13 over on Saturday, intending to repatriate the boy’s remains to the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, they did not match those of a male age 13 or 14. Instead, they belonged to a female age 15 to 20, the Army said in a statement.

Her remains were reburied in the same grave on Monday and marked unknown.

“The Army is committed to seeking more information in an effort to determine where the remains of Wade Ayres are buried so that he may be returned to his family and the Catawba nation,” the Army said.

Messages were sent to Catawba and Army officials on Tuesday seeking more information about efforts to locate Wade. It was also unclear whether the Army is seeking to match the unidentified female to a tribe.

The discovery came as the Army disinters the remains of eight Native American children who died at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The disinterment process began earlier this month and is the fifth such project at Carlisle, the home of the U.S. Army War

College.

The Army transferred more than 20 sets of Native American remains from Carlisle in earlier years, but its repatriation efforts have not always gone as planned. In 2017, a grave thought to belong to a 10-year-old child actually contained two sets of remains, from a teenage male and a person of undetermined age and sex.