The grave of Paul Wheelock as the Office of Army Cemeteries prepare to disinter eight Native American graves at the Carlisle Barracks on June 10, 2022. There children were students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated by the Department of the Interior until 1919.
Jeremy Long / WITF
Jeremy Long / WITF
The grave of Paul Wheelock as the Office of Army Cemeteries prepare to disinter eight Native American graves at the Carlisle Barracks on June 10, 2022. There children were students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated by the Department of the Interior until 1919.
Late last month, Loretta Webster and four of her family members drove more than 13 hours from Oneida, Wisconsin, to Carlisle. They were on a journey to bring home a loved one who died more than a century ago.
Webster and her family were traveling to the Carlisle Indian Boarding School Cemetery on the grounds of the U.S. Army’s Carlisle barracks. The military was returning the remains of seven Native American children to their tribal families. Webster was there for the transfer ceremony of two Oneida boys — Paul Wheelock and Frank Green. The 83-year-old is the relative of Wheelock. Her father was Wheelock’s first cousin. Many of the remains have been reinterred at home, the U.S. Army announced on Thursday.
Webster found out she was related to Wheelock when the Oneida tribal nation called her and told her she was the closest living person related to him, and asked if she wanted to bring him back to the reservation.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first government-run boarding school that sought to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into white society.
“They wanted to change Indian people so that they no longer relied on their language, their culture and their family for directions and that they would integrate into the larger society, ” Webster said. “I don’t think that happened.” Webster said that her father, who died more than 30 years ago, ran away from a Native American boarding school in Wisconsin because his mother had died and no one had told him.
Wheelock died when he was just 10 months old. His father, Dennison Wheelock, was a renowned composer and band leader of the Carlisle Indian Band, which had gained international recognition. Wheelock’s “Suite Aboriginal” premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1900, the year Paul died.
“These young kids in many ways didn’t have any parental love at these institutions, and it was just a lot of rules, and they couldn’t speak their language,” Webster said. “The thing that we found with Paul, because he was a baby, and his parents were there, he was loved. He was loved, and we felt like he should be back with his community.”
Jeremy Long / WITF
The grave of Frank Green as the Office of Army Cemeteries prepare to disinter eight Native American graves at the Carlisle Barracks on June 10, 2022. There children were students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated by the Department of the Interior until 1919.
Frank Green was 16 when he died run over by a train while attempting to escape Carlisle, according to student records maintained through Dickinson College. The boarding school’s newspaper account of his death read: “He tried to get others to run away with him but their good sense prevailed and they refused to go. We trust that the lesson, though a severe one, will be of use to us all.”
The remains of Wheelock and Green were shipped to Milwaukee to be returned to the Oneida tribal nation. They were reinterred at the Church of the Holy Apostles’ cemetery, following a ceremony and community feast.
This is the Office of Cemeteries’ fifth round of disinterments at the cemetery in Cumberland County, which started on June 12. The OAC’s effort to exhume and repatriate the remains of children who died while attending the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School–the first government-run for Native American students–started in 2017.
“The combined Army team was privileged to support families and return seven more children this summer, totaling 28 over the past six years,” said Renea Yates, Director of the Office of Army Cemeteries. “We are committed to caring for the graves of children who remain buried at the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery and will continue to support the disinterment of those requested to be returned.”
The OAC’s original plan was to return eight children to their tribes. The remains found in the grave that was thought to belong to Wade Ayers– a Catawba child who died when he was 13 or 14 — were not not his. Instead, the Army’s forensic anthropologists determined they belonged to a female ranging in age from 15 to 20 years old. The girl’s unidentified remains were reinterred in a ceremony on June 20th with the assistance of the Catawba family, the Army said.
The military says it believes the children’s graves might have been switched when the cemetery was relocated in 1927 to make way for construction. In her prepared remarks, Yates said that “accountability and chain of custody, both of paramount importance in the management of human remains, was likely not as robust as it is today.”
Yates says the children at the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery were buried between 1879 and 1910.
Supervisory Archeologist Christopher Koenig explained that in 1927, military and private cemeteries did not have “sophisticated transfer procedures” to carry out the work of relocating a cemetery.
The families of the children traveled to Carlisle in June to receive the remains of their relatives in a transfer ceremony. The U.S. Army paid for their travel expenses and lodging.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded by the U.S. Army general Richard Pratt, whose motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The school operated for nearly 30 years. During that time, more than 180 children died, often from illnesses, dietary deficiencies and poor living conditions.
The other children who were returned to their native lands are:
Gabriela Martínez is part of the “Report for America” program — a national service effort that places journalists in newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered topics and communities.
Get insights into WITF’s newsroom and an invitation to join in the pursuit of trustworthy journalism.
