Caravan Bringing Home Remains of Rosebud Sioux Children

The disinterred remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania are headed home to Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota. A ceremony on Wednesday at the U.S. Army Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, returned them to relatives. The cemetery contains more than 180 graves of students who attended the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School — a government-run boarding school for Native American children. It’s part of the fourth such set of transfers to take place at the Army cemetery since 2017. The remains of an Alaskan Aleut child were returned to her tribe earlier this summer. The remains inside small wooden coffins were carried past a phalanx of tribal members and well-wishers before being loaded into a vehicle and driven to South Dakota.

The Army is fully funding the cost of the project — about $500,000 per year, including travel to the transfer ceremony, as well as transport and reburial of the deceased children.

Since 2016, dozens of Native American and Alaskan Native families have requested that their ancestors be returned from Carlisle. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s youth council members encouraged the tribal council to seek the return of the children’s remains after a visit to the Carlisle grounds in 2015.

The children’s English names, and where available their Native Americans names, were: Dennis Strikes First (Blue Tomahawk), Rose Long Face (Little Hawk), Lucy Take The Tail (Pretty Eagle), Warren Painter (Bear Paints Dirt), Ernest Knocks Off (White Thunder), Maud Little Girl (Swift Bear), Friend Hollow Horn Bear, Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull) and Alvan — also known as Roaster, Kills Seven Horses and One That Kills Seven Horses; and Sophia Tetoff of the Alaskan Aleut tribe on Saint Paul Island in the Bering Sea.