Army Refuses To Return Indigenous Boys' Remains

The Winnebago have sued to force the military to comply with a longstanding law requiring the U.S. government to return Native human remains to their tribes.

On Sept. 7, 1895, two teenage boys from the Winnebago tribe entered Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The Indian agent designated by the federal government to oversee the tribe, Capt. W.H. Beck, had forced the boys, Edward Hensley and Samuel Gilbert, into five-year terms at a boarding school that the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran on Army property.

Forty-seven days later, Samuel was dead. Edward died in 1899, a year before his term would have ended. It’s not clear how either of them died, but administrators buried both boys on school grounds. No records exist to confirm whether the school sought permission from the children’s families to bury them there. It’s not clear when, or even if, school officials notified the families of Samuel’s and Edward’s deaths.

Today, Samuel’s and Edward’s graves are part of an Indian cemetery featured as a stop on tours about the history of what now serves as the Carlisle barracks. Samuel’s tombstone misspells his tribe’s name as “Winnchaga.” Edward’s reads “Winnebaloo” and lacks a date of death.

When Sunshine Thomas-Bear first tried to bring the boys’ remains home to the tribe three years ago, it looked like an open-and-shut case. Thomas-Bear acts as Winnebago’s representative of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, a federal law enacted in 1990 that requires museums and state agencies that had pilfered tribal lands to return human remains and sacred objects. The law requires agencies to return human remains within 90 days of a formal request.

But the U.S. Army flatly refused to recognize NAGPRA, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, instead pushing Winnebago to use the Army’s own process and prodding them to pass a resolution through the Tribal Council before moving forward. Now Winnebago is suing the Army to force compliance with the repatriation act in a case that could have implications for other institutions that have skirted the law or slow-walked compliance.