At last, the Indian children have come home
T. STEPHENS, Wyo. – People arrived at the cemetery in shiny late-model sedans and in old pickup trucks splashed with mud, but it was three riderless horses that led the Northern Arapaho into a day of grief and celebration.
The children were home at last.
Around and around the horses went, each with a small war bonnet strapped to its empty saddle, kicking up clouds of brown dust, provoking calls and cries to honor three boys who died in the confines of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
For 130 years the youths lay in Pennsylvania soil, far from their homes and families, never seen but never unmourned. Their return to these majestic mountain lands became a quest that reached an emotional conclusion here Friday on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said tribal elder Crawford White Sr., 76, who this month helped lead a delegation to Carlisle, where authorities disinterred three graves on what is now the campus of the Army War College. “It’s the beginning of the closure, the start of healing.”
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A much older generation, gone now, said goodbye in 1881 to Horse, Little Chief, and Little Plume when they were taken across the country to Carlisle, where masters and teachers did all they could to extinguish the students’ native traditions and culture. Within two years, all three were dead.
On Friday, a newer generation, people who grew up hearing the stories and imagining the boys’ terror, stepped forward to fulfill the hopes of their ancestors.
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“There are no words that could possibly convey the emotion this has brought me,” said Olivia Washington, who is related to Horse and traveled to Carlisle with the delegation. “But just knowing that Horse is finally home, to be put to rest with his family and among his people brings a great comfort and peace.”
This is one of many stories of these children published in the Philadelphia papers. Wanted to kind of finish the story arch. Stay away from the comment section unless you want to be depressed.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/at-last-the-indian-children-have-come-home-20170818.html
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