This is an excerpt from:
"A Very Correct Idea of Our School": A Photographic History of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
When the cemetery at the school was established in January 1880, it was on the edge of the barracks property, a little to the east of the workshops. The athletic field was positioned just to the southeast of the cemetery, so that when the grand stand was added to the field, it had its back to the cemetery. Over a period of thirty-eight years, the cemetery was the site of nearly two hundred burials, and when the school closed in 1918, the cemetery closed as well.
In the mid-1920s, the Army Medical Field Service School wanted to expand its facilities into what had been the vacant land on the other side of the cemetery, and accordingly the commandant of the Carlisle Barracks inquired if the old cemetery could be “gotten out of the way.”[i] By 1927 permission had been granted by the Army for the cemetery to be moved to a location further from the center of the barracks grounds. (There is no indication that any Native Americans, including families, were consulted during this process of relocation.)
A survey of the old cemetery was completed in February of that year, based solely on the information available from the somewhat deteriorated grave markers. No records about the earlier burials were consulted, since all the documentation about the school had been transferred to the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington. The survey indicated that there were 186 graves to be moved, and that they were unable to identify the occupants of 8 of those graves. A preliminary plan had been laid out the previous November for the new cemetery, and that design included space for 192 burials.
Sixteen men were hired, and the job of moving the cemetery was conducted during July and August that year.[ii] As work progressed, the workmen discovered more graves than had been mapped out months earlier, so the new cemetery had to be expanded. With the disinterments and reburials complete, the new cemetery had 194 occupied graves. Of those, 14 grave sites received markers that simply read “unknown.” The order and arrangement of the old cemetery was not retained with the new burials; in other words, individuals were not reburied in the positions they had been in relation to one another in the original cemetery, and as a result, identifying the unknown individuals was rendered impossible based simply on any extant documentation that might be consulted at a later date.
When new standard military-style headstones were put in place in the new cemetery, they contained many errors. Some could be attributed to difficulty in reading the old markers, but others could only be due to carelessness and lack of oversight. Individuals named Susie, Ernest, and Henry received markers with the names Susia, Earnest, and Henery. Tribal affiliations of the Carlisle students buried there reflected some additional errors. As a few examples, one Winnebago student was listed as Winnchaga and another was listed as Winnebaloo, while a Nez Perce student received a stone marked Nox Perie. All of the headstones featured, when known, the individual’s name, Nation, date of death, and age at the time of death. A few stones also named the father of the deceased.
Cemetery at the Carlisle Barracks, c. 1935. Photographic print. Paul Adams Yates, James Ramsay Humer, Russell D. Smith, and William Bentz Carroll, “The Carlisle Indian School Cemetery: A List of the Those Buried There,” [undated], [unnumbered page 2]. GI-Y33c, Cumberland County Historical Society.
Over the next several decades, the cemetery expanded as barracks personnel and their family members were buried there. The first such interment took place in 1935, with the burial of an infant child of one of the officers of the Medical Field School. Altogether, nearly forty additional individuals would be buried here, most during the 1940s and 1950s. The new interments also seem to have necessitated the periodic replacement of all of the headstones, in order to conform to changes in the standard military style and to keep all of the grave markers uniform. These replacements of the headstones resulted in additional errors being introduced to the cemetery, both in terms of the information printed on the stones as well as the plots on which they were placed.
Beginning in the 2000s, family members began efforts to request the repatriation of remains of several of the Carlisle students buried there. In August 2017, members of the Northern Arapaho tribe traveled to Carlisle to be present for the exhumation of remains of three boys from their tribe. They returned home with only two; the remains of the third child were not found, a victim of the errors introduced by the replacement of headstones years earlier. The third boy’s remains were properly identified in June 2018, and the remains of two other Carlisle students were returned home to their families that same month. The five individuals who have been disinterred from the Carlisle Barracks cemetery thus far are not expected to be the last, as requests by family members for repatriation will likely continue so that those who wish to do so may bring their ancestors back home.
[i] Jacqueline Fear-Segal. White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 242.
[ii] Fear-Segal 242.