The US military has begun disinterring the remains of eight Native American children in a small cemetery on the grounds of the US Army War College in Pennsylvania to return them to their families.
The disinterment process, which began during the weekend, is the fifth at Carlisle, Pennsylvania since 2017. More than 20 sets of Native remains were transferred to family members in earlier rounds.
The children had lived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where thousands of Native children were taken from their families and forced to assimilate into white society as a matter of US policy – their hair cut and their clothing, language and culture stripped.
More than 10,000 children from more than 140 tribes passed through the school between 1879 and 1918, including famous Olympian Jim Thorpe.
“If you survived this experience and were able to go back home, you were a stranger. You couldn’t even speak the language your parents spoke,” Rae Skenandore, of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, told The Associated Press news agency.
You can read more in an article published at https://bit.ly/39u2a8W.