CARLISLE, Pa. — The Carlisle Indian Industrial School had not yet held its first class when Matavito Horse and Leah Road Traveler were taken there in October 1879, drafted into the U.S. government’s campaign to erase Native American tribes by wiping their children’s identities.
A few years later, Matavito, a Cheyenne boy, and Leah, an Arapaho girl, were dead.
Persistent efforts by their tribes have finally brought them home. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma received 16 of its children, exhumed from a Pennsylvania cemetery, and reburied their small wooden coffins last month in a tribal cemetery in Concho, Oklahoma. A 17th student, Wallace Perryman, was repatriated to the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma in Wewoka.
Burial ceremonies are “an important step toward justice and healing for the families and Tribal Nations impacted by the boarding school era,” the Cheyenne and Arapaho government said. Seminole communications director Mark Williams said Perryman’s family wanted no public statements.
Most details are lost to history, but records in the National Archives and documents assembled by a team at Dickinson College offer glimpses into experiences at Carlisle, where 7,800 students from more than 100 tribes were sent as the U.S. government systematically and violently evicted Native Americans from their lands to seize them for white settlers…