Remains disinterred from Carlisle Barracks don’t match Native American teenager: Army

• By Daniel Urie/PennLive.com

For about ten days this month, U.S. Army officials are conducting the disinterment of five children from the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School who died well over a century ago and are buried on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks at the Carlisle Post Cemetery.

The children are being disinterred at the request of family members or tribes.

Edward Spott from the Puyallup Tribe was one of the five children that was expected to be exhumed.

On Thursday, however, when the Army conducted a disinterment of grave E-14 at the Carlisle Post Cemetery, which records indicated was for Spott, the remains recovered were of an approximately 16–22-year-old female, not a 17–18-year-old male.

The Army says that the unknown remains were reinterred in a dignified ceremony on Friday with the assistance of the Puyallup family.

“The Army is committed to reviewing all available resources and seeking new information that may help us identify any possible error that led to this anomaly so we can make the appropriate effort to return Edward to his family and the Puyallup Tribe,” Army officials said in a statement.

This is at least the third time at this cemetery since 2017 that the remains buried in a plot did not match the person that was expected to be buried at that location.

Last year, the Army exhumed a grave thought to belong to Wade Ayres of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, who died in 1904. The remains did not match those of a male aged 13 or 14, but instead were found to be consistent with a female aged 15 to 20.

In 2017, a grave thought to belong to a 10-year-old Native American child actually contained two sets of remains, one from a teenage male and the other from a person of undetermined age and sex.

Before the most recent disinterments, there were 173 children from the school buried at the cemetery, including 16 unknown students.

The other four students expected to be disinterred include Beau Neal from the Northern Arapaho Tribe; Launy Shorty from the Blackfeet Tribe; Amos LaFramboise from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe; and Edward Upright from the Spirit Lake Tribe.

Today, the Carlisle Barracks is home to the U.S. Army War College but from 1879 until 1918, the Carlisle Barracks was the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, operated by the Department of the Interior. The school enrolled more than 10,000 Native American children from approximately 50 Native American tribes across the country.

The Army has repatriated 28 children over the last five years and will continue with the next group in 2024.

This is the sixth round of repatriations from Carlisle Barracks, a process that began in 2017 after the Office of Army Cemeteries first began to field requests from interested survivors and tribes.

The Carlisle school was the first of hundreds of boarding schools operated as part of a government-led program aimed at assimilating Native Americans into Anglo-American society.

Loretta Webster, an Oneida Nation member who came to Carlisle in 2022 for the remains of Paul Wheelock, her father’s cousin, told PennLive at the time that the effects from the residential Indian boarding schools still impact Native Americans today.

“There’s still a lot of trauma in our community and I’m sure in all the reservation communities where children were taken (away from their families). There were families that moved away from the reservation to try to protect their children from being taken, so this era (in the early 1900s) was a very traumatic time for the families trying to raise their children,” Webster said. “And there’s repercussions of that even today, that we feel.”

The Army inherited this post in 1918 from the Department of the Interior. The Barracks cemetery is the only one maintained by the Army that predominantly housed indigenous boarding school students.