By Analyse Jester, Gaylord News
Leaders of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes in Anadarko, who have been waiting for the return of its children who died at an Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania, were excited that two of those who passed away there would be returned this week to the ancestral homelands.
That excitement dissipated when the tribal leaders, who had gone to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, learned on Wednesday that the remains of only one child would be returning to Anadarko this trip.
Kate Ross, who will be reinterred in a graveside ceremony at Rock Springs Cemetery at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, is first of the children whose remains will be brought back to Anadarko in the coming years. The ceremony was originally planned to also celebrate the return of the remains of Alfred Charko.
Ross, who died at the age of 15 after three years at Carlisle, was taken from her Anadarko family on Oct. 27, 1879. Charko, who died less than six months after arriving at Carlisle on Aug. 31, 1882, was also 15.
“We were made aware that there would be challenges and that the potential misidentified graves were a possibility,” the tribe said in a statement posted on its website. “During the final report given by the disinterment team on Wednesday, we learned that remains from the grave marked as Alfred Charko could not be confirmed.
“There were physical traits that did not align with the age Mr Charko was at the time of his death,” the army told the tribes’ representatives, President Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe, Vice President Tasha Mousseau and Secretary Starr Chavez.
“As a result, we will only be bringing the remains of Kate Ross home. While we are saddened to not return Alfred to our Kitikitish homelands, we know that the amazing team at Carlisle will continue to look for our relative and return him to our people one day,” the tribes said in its statement.
Between 1,500 and 1,800 Native American students from Oklahoma attended the school in Carlisle, Penn. Some never made it back home.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened in 1879, was one of the first and most well-known boarding schools for Native children, and its operational model set the standard for most boarding schools across the country.
For many tribes in Oklahoma, the horrors of the Carlisle model were experienced closer to home. The purpose of Carlisle, as well as other boarding schools across the nation, was to remove Native Americans from their cultures and lifestyles and assimilate them into the white man’s society.
That was the same intent that inspired Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of Carlisle Indian school, to strip Native children of their cultures.
“In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” said Pratt, who coined the phrase while serving as a soldier in the Oklahoma territory.
Riverside Indian Boarding School, organized in 1871 by Quaker missionaries, is one of two federally operated American Indian Boarding Schools still open in Oklahoma, down from the more than 80 that operated across the state over a century ago. The other is in Tahlequah.
Today, Anadarko’s Riverside school is the nation's oldest federally operated American Indian boarding school. It was also the first stop on the listening tour by Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland when the government launched its investigation two years ago into the boarding schools. The investigation found that at least 973 children died at the schools across the country.
The Wichita tribe is hosting a Day of Remembrance today (Friday) from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Following the Saturday graveside services, there will be a Celebration of Life at the Wichita Community Building to honor the tribe’s children whose lives were lost during the adoption of the Indian Boarding School Policy.
The Army began its efforts to return the remains of children buried in the Carlisle cemetery in 2017. The operation to return the remains of the children is led by the U.S. Office of Army Cemeteries, along with archaeological and anthropological expertise from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Army said it is planning to return the remains of Albert Mekko to the Seminole tribe this fall. It already returned the remains of a child to Oklahoma’s Modoc tribe several years ago.
Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. For more stories by Gaylord News go to GaylordNews.net
For more information about Native Americans in Oklahoma go to the Gaylord News series “Exiled to Indian Country.”
