How discovering Edward Spot in a boarding school cemetery opened old family wounds — and ignited a mission to bring him home
The Puyallup Tribal Cemetery sits on a hill above Interstate 5 in Tacoma, Washington. Beyond the freeway and the Tacoma Dome, toxic industries flourish on what was once lush marshland where the Puyallup River flows into Puget Sound. The river’s tideflats, originally a place where abundant aquatic life fed the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, is now the location of an LNG facility, a gasoline refinery, numerous container facilities, Trident Seafoods and an immigration detention center.
The Puyallup Tribal Cemetery sits above it all like a sentinel protecting the reservation from the city. A stone fence surrounds it, forming a barrier between the old world of the Puyallup Indians and the new world of the settlers who stole their land and murdered nearly all their people. Flowers, ribbons and sometimes feathers adorn almost every grave.
On the other side of the country, in Pennsylvania, is another cemetery filled with Native graves, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery. A 2017 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ground penetrating radar study determined that 228 burial plots are located there, of which 180 are of Native children from 50 different tribes. An additional 48 graves contain the remains of veterans, their dependents and even POWs from the Revolutionary War and the French and Indian War.
But the total number of graves is unknown. The radar survey failed to detect burials under five markers and also detected 55 possible unmarked burials…