Little Chief, other native children to finally go home
Next month, if all goes as planned, Little Chief will finally be going home.
Home to the rocky expanse of the Wyoming reservation he left as a boy of 14. Home to a family that, four generations later, still mourns his loss. Home from a cemetery on the grounds of what was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, now the Army War College, where he lies among nearly 200 native children who died in a misbegotten experiment in forced assimilation.
“Each child has a story,” said Yufna Soldier Wolf, the great niece of Little Chief, who has worked to return him and two compatriots to their Northern Arapaho lands. “Let those stories be told through their sacrifices, which were their lives.”
After more than a year of hearings, studies, and planning, the Army has set an Aug. 8 date to begin turning over the remains of Indian children to their families and tribes. A Northern Arapaho delegation will travel to Carlisle to formally accept the first three.
Little Chief, the eldest son of Chief Sharp Nose, arrived at the school on March 11, 1881, accompanied by two friends, Horse, age 11, and Little Plume, 9.
Within two years, all three were dead. They weren’t the first or last to perish.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/little-chief-other-native-children-to-finally-go-home-20170703.html
There have been a series of articles on the Carlisle Indian school running in the Philly paper. Guess the bureaucracy runs slow in the Army, but it does at least run. Glad to see the right thing done (eventually) but will be real surprised if they find much of anything to return home.