Returning Home: Two Native American Children Buried at Carlisle Returned

By Patriot-News (Harrisburg, PA)

It has been more than a century, but they are finally going home.

Three Native American children, buried at what is now the Carlisle Barracks, were disinterred in August, which started the process of returning their remains to their rightful home in Wyoming, capping decades of efforts to get them there.

The three children were members of the Northern Arapaho Nation and are among the 200 who died when they were students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Their names, according to a June 21 notice in the Federal Register, are Horse, Little Chief and Little Plume. While at the school, their names were Anglicized to Horace Washington, Dickens Nor and Hayes Vanderbilt-Friday.

Carlisle Indian School was part of the federal government’s efforts in the late 19th Century to assimilate Native Americans into the dominant white culture, uprooting close to 1 million children from their tribal homes and transporting them thousands of miles to boarding schools.

Between 1879 and 1918, more than 10,000 were housed in Carlisle, the flagship school built upon a military model.

According to their student records, the three Northern Arapahoe children all arrived at the school on March 11, 1881. Little Plume was 9, Horse was 11 and Little Chief was 14.

Life at the Carlisle Indian School was often harsh, marred by poor living conditions, inadequate nutrition and overcrowding. The children were overworked, and farmed out during the summer months to nearby homes and farms to be housekeepers, farmhands and laborers. Many were sexually or physically abused; and most of the hundreds who died succumbed to epidemics.

Little Plume died April 15, 1882, and a few months later, in June 1882, Horse also died. Little Chief died on Jan. 23, 1883.

Their remains, and those of many other students who died, were never returned to their homes. They were buried at the barracks along Claremont Road, marked with white headstones.

The effort to bring them home culminated in a meeting in Rosebud, South Dakota, last year between the leaders of several nations and the U.S. Army.

“When you think of parents not seeing their child ever again, and they going to their grave, it’s a historical event for our people,” Russell Eagle Bear, the historic-preservation officer for the Rosebud Sioux and one of the forces behind the movement, told PennLive (Patriot News) last year.

“One generation after another, knowing you have relatives in another part of the country, it’s historical grief that’s created.”

The Young Boys and Girls

Who were the American Indian children buried at Carlisle Barracks? As disinterring of bodies takes place, century-old records shed some light on the children.

Did they excel in music? In sports? Were they good students? Did they get homesick? How did they die?

Many unanswered questions surround the short lives of Little Plume, Little Chief and Horse and hundreds of other Native American children buried there. They were the first of the 180 Carlisle Indian Industrial School students buried at the Carlisle Barracks to be disinterred for their return home, a process that started in late August 2017.

The Army, the Army National Military Cemeteries and a team of anthropologists and archaeologists had the solemn task of disinterring the boys, of whom, for years, little was known beyond the names carved in white headstones.

Because of the work at Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center at Dickinson College, more is known about the boys.

The center’s archivist, Jim Gerencser, explained the project started five years ago with a Mellon Foundation grant, and since then, teams of students and researchers have been digitizing and annotating Carlisle Indian School photographs and documents from the National Archives, as well as the Cumberland County Historical Society and some private collections.

Most of these American Indian students came from the West, and the great distance made it difficult for descendants to learn about their family members.

“Making everything available online facilitates that kind of exploration by descendants and researchers,” he said.

Original Identity

Among the 200,000-plus pages of documentation was one group photo that likely includes Little Plume, Little Chief and Horse, as well as a student card for each of the boys. All three, according to the student cards and the photo, arrived at the school on March 11, 1881, and died within two years.

Little Plume, whose name was Anglicized to Hayes Vanderbilt Friday, was 9 years old when he arrived. His father is listed as Bill Friday, who worked as a butcher.

Little Plume died just over a year after his arrival, on April 15, 1882. But in a development reported late Friday by The Associated Press, the Army said the remains in the grave with Little Plume’s headstone don’t match his age. The grave, the Army said, contains two sets of unidentified remains, of a teenage male and a person of undetermined age or sex. They will be reinterred at the site.

Little Chief, whose name became Dickens Nor, was the son of Sharp Nose, listed as a second chief. He was 14 when he arrived at the school, and he died a year and a half after his arrival on Jan. 22, 1883.

And 11-year-old Horse, renamed Horace Washington, had his father’s name listed as Washington, a chief of police. He died on June 12, 1882.

Carlisle Indian School History

In 1879, Army Col. Richard Henry Pratt took over the Carlisle Barracks to create an Indian school.

Pratt had little respect for the reservation system, which he believed imprisoned Indians and alienated them from American society. He advocated the forced assimilation of Indians, requiring them to learn English, train in industrial occupations and practice the customs of white society. Pratt summed up his educational philosophy in the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Pratt expected his graduates to serve as models to the Indians they had left behind, but on returning to the reservations, students often found themselves trained for jobs that did not exist, ostracized by their peers and still victimized by white prejudices.

But what were their lives like? Those memories have faded across the generations, but Gerencser and Susan Rose, Dickinson College professor of sociology and director of the Community Studies Center, can paint a picture of what they may have witnessed through the recorded, shared experiences of the 10,000 children who attended the school between 1879 and 1918.

“Some children at the school had positive experiences,” Rose said. “Others were traumatized.”

Some were captured and forced to attend.

Others were sent to the school by their tribes following negotiations between the chiefs and the U.S. government. Still others, whose parents had attended, went voluntarily to learn how to read, write and speak English and perhaps have a life among the whites.

It was often a difficult and traumatic transition from tribal life to the military-style regimen of the Carlisle Indian School.

The children’s traditional clothing was replaced with uniforms. Their hair was cut, they were forbidden to speak their language or practice their customs and they took on new names.

Rose and Gerencser explained the first half of the day was often spent in the classroom and the second half in vocational training. The boys had four days of open gymnasium time. The girls, segregated from the boys, only had one.

“They were trying to fully assimilate these Indian children so they were not doing anything they would be doing at their own homes at their reservations,” Gerencser said. “The school controlled every aspect of the children’s lives.”

After they had been at the school for a few years, they would often live with a family in town to become more enveloped in the dominant white culture. They also spent their summers working on nearby farms in what was called an “outing.”

Historians’ perspectives of the methods of founder Lt. Richard Pratt are just as clashing and varied as the experiences of the children who attended the school.

Rose explained that Pratt believed the American Indians could be equal to the whites, which was quite a progressive philosophy at the time. But to become the white’s equal, Pratt felt the school had to eradicate everything about the children that was Indian.

“Was this a progressive, benevolent educational experiment or a form of cultural genocide?” she asked. “Some may answer, ‘It’s both.’ While it might be too soon to tell if the return of these long-lost children is the final chapter in a tearful story for some American Indian families, it is a historic moment.

“I think it’s primarily speaking to the hope for reconciliation,” Rose said. “That first step is to acknowledge the violence against the Indian peoples.”

But those specters of the past persist today, she said, citing Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We are witnessing history, though, she said, and it will be a part of the endless pages of documents and photos left to scan and upload onto the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center for the education of future generations.

Two Matched, One Didn’t

The disinterring the remains of three American Indian boys was a solemn process for all involved, but perhaps the most difficult part for the team of scientists who came to the Carlisle Barracks to do this work was telling a family that the grave for one of the boys did not contain his remains.

It was not an easy telling the Northern Arapaho descendants of Little Plume that these were not the remains of the boy, anthropologist Elizabeth DiGangi said at a press conference in Carlisle.

“Each one of these kids was the most loved person in the world for somebody else,” she said. Though they died 130 years ago, “The pain of their loss does not just go away.”

She was part of the team tasked with disinterring Little Chief, Little Plume and Horse, who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School 130 years ago.

Despite one set of remains not matching the marked grave, team members say the boys, who were moved from one cemetery to another in the 1920s, appear to have been buried with great care following the standards of the time.

Little Chief and Horse are being returned to their home in Wyoming with the Northern Arapaho.

The remains of two different people found in Little Plume’s grave have been re-interred.