The boys were taken from their homes on the northeast Nebraska reservation in early September 1895, part of a small group on a three-day train bound for Pennsylvania.
They were heading for a five-year term at the first government-run Native American boarding school, General Richard Henry Pratt’s experiment to “kill the Indian, save the man.”
At Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the boys would have their hair cut and traditional clothing taken. They would follow militaristic routines and speak only English. They would join tens of thousands of Native American children, educated in the European-American style, stripped of their cultures and forced to assimilate.
Of the five Winnebago students who boarded that train, only two would make it home.
William Pinegar, 19, ran away from the school just 38 days after he arrived. His student card was marked across the top in slanted red cursive: Dead.
Samuel Gilbert, 19, also known as La-coo-hoo-he-kaw, made it to day 47 before succumbing to pneumonia. Before fall gave way to winter, his life was reduced to a series of pencil marks in the death record section of Carlisle’s Register of Pupils.
Edward Hensley, 17 when he arrived, lived four more years. He played in the school band and learned to be a tinsmith. He worked for four different white American families through the school’s “outings” system. He was “a most excellent young man, beloved by all.”
Pneumonia killed him on June 29, 1899.
Samuel and Edward were, and still are, buried on the school grounds. Historians haven’t found any record of any attempt to contact the Winnebago Tribe about either boy’s illness or death.
“They’re two of many, many, many students that didn’t ever return home,” said Sunshine Thomas-Bear, tribal historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.
Now the boys, dead for more than a century, are at the center of a lawsuit the Winnebago Tribe has filed against the United States Army.
To bring Samuel and Edward’s remains home, the Army says the tribe must find the boys’ closest living relatives to work through its process.
The Winnebago Tribe wants the Army to follow the federal policy that already lets tribes repatriate lost and stolen remains from federal institutions and places like museums.
This court battle could have an impact far beyond Carlisle and the two boys.
Carlisle was one of 408 Native American boarding schools run by the federal government. So far, 53 burial sites have been identified at those schools in an initial investigative report by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Researchers expect more grave sites to be discovered. Samuel and Edward are two of many lost children that tribes will want to bring home.
Square peg, round hole
Samuel and Edward rest under misspelled headstones in the Carlisle Barracks Main Post Cemetery.
Their tribal affiliations are still carved into the markers as “Winnebaloo” and “Winnchaga.”
The Winnebago Tribe sees the headstones as a symbol of historic disrespect and the government’s lack of care toward the children buried there.
“Our beliefs are that their spirits have not continued on their journey that they take to the afterlife … they remain lost,” Thomas-Bear said.
The Office of Army Cemeteries manages Carlisle’s gravesites, and fields tribes’ requests for the children to be disinterred, using an adapted version of its own process for returning the bodies of soldiers.
Under that process, the closest living relative of a person buried at Carlisle can file two documents to request the return of their remains. The Army conducts disinterments once per year and pays all expenses.
Since 2017, the Army has returned the remains of 32 children, an OAC spokeswoman said in an email. Currently there are 11 disinterments scheduled for September 2024 and 18 for the following year.
“The Office of Army Cemeteries is committed to conducting dignified and safe disinterment and transfer custody to families who have established they are the closest family link between the decedent and requestor,” the OAC spokeswoman said.
But finding that family member isn’t always realistic, and sometimes – like with Samuel and Edward – borders on impossible, tribal leaders say.
Many Carlisle students didn’t have living parents. Some 48% of the students were missing at least one parent when they arrived, said Jim Gerencser, archivist for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. The school didn’t record the names of students’ deceased parents in their files, further complicating efforts to trace direct family ties now.
And students buried at Carlisle died too young to marry and have children.
Edward Hensley had no living parents. Samuel Gilbert had a living mother, but her name wasn’t recorded. The name of his deceased father, White Gull, was written in the address section of his information card.
“Trying to force the tribes into that construct is obviously illegal and disrespectful. It’s particularly tone deaf when you’re talking about the closest living relative, and we’re talking about children,” said Greg Werkheiser, attorney for Cultural Heritage Partners, which is representing the Winnebago in the lawsuit.
The Winnebago Tribe wants the Army to return the bodies of Samuel and Edward to the tribe under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
Then, tribes only need to show that remains were culturally affiliated with the tribe, not directly related to a descendant, said Beth Wright, attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, another group representing the Winnebago.
The law was designed by Congress to ensure that both tribes and Native American remains and burial sites are treated with respect.
“Under their process, they don’t have to care what the Winnebago’s burial traditions are, the same way they’ve been disregarded for 100 years,” Werkheiser said. “Under NAGPRA that’s supposed to be central, so that this process is healing, instead of just the shifting of remains from one location to another.”
The Army has repeatedly denied that NAGPRA, which has mainly been used to repatriate remains from museums and universities, applies to the children buried at Carlisle, because the cemetery is not a “holding or collection” of remains.
At least two other tribes have tried to repatriate their children from Carlisle under the law, but this is the first lawsuit filed to challenge the U.S. Army’s claim that the law doesn’t apply.
Before the Northern Arapaho requested to repatriate three of their children under NAGPRA in 2015, the Army had no process for repatriating Carlisle students and had refused requests to return their remains.
In a letter denying the first 2007 request from the Northern Arapaho tribe, Lt. Col. Thomas G. Kane wrote that the Army would “hate to disrupt such a tranquil site, if it can be avoided” and “the cemetery represents one of the most beautiful tributes to the Native American people.”
Small, orderly and historical
Visitors to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, can still take a self-guided tour of the remaining school grounds, including the gymnasium, the band stand and the cemetery.
“Small, orderly and historical, the Carlisle Cemetery offers visitors a glimpse into the unique past of the United States and Native American history,” the OAC website describes the cemetery.
The Winnebago Tribe doesn’t want the remains of its children being used to tell a history of the boarding school process that was bad and dehumanizing for the students, Thomas-Bear said.
“How would you feel if that was your family there?” Thomas-Bear said. “And then they make it seem like, ‘oh, this was all just this greatest thing.’ If you tell a history, tell it truthfully.”
Edward’s headstone lists his name, Edward Hensley, and the misspelled tribal affiliation “Winnebaloo.” Underneath that, where you’d expect a birth and death date, his gravestone is blank.
Samuel Gilbert’s headstone has his tribal affiliation as “Winnchaga” and a death date that’s different from the one recorded in his student file.
“Part of NAGPRA is to ensure that tribes and ancestors and all of these things are handled with the utmost care and in a dignified manner,” Thomas-Bear said. “And that definitely hasn’t happened with the Army at Carlisle.”
During previous disinterments, the Army has found remains that don’t match the name on the grave. For some students, only partial remains were found and returned. At least 14 headstones at Carlisle read only “unknown.”
When the U.S. Army started to relocate the original burial site for construction in 1927, the actual process of moving graves went mostly undocumented, Gerencser said.
Workers may have had multiple graves open at the same time, Gerencser said, which could’ve caused the partial and mixed remains found during recent disinterments.
Ground penetrating radar was used to survey both the current and old cemetery sites before the first disinterments in 2016, Gerencser said.
Some tribal members consider the surveying process to be invasive – a further disturbance to the remains, they think, and more proof that the students buried at Carlisle have long been mistreated.
“If you were looking for your grandparent, and you found out this museum had them and were studying them and they were on display or whatnot, how would you feel about that?” Thomas-Bear said.
The loss of Edward and Samuel is part of a series of historical traumas the government inflicted upon the Winnebago, Thomas-Bear said, intended to break their people.
In 1863, the tribe itself was forcibly moved off its traditional land near Minnesota to the Dakota Territories and then, eventually, to northeast Nebraska.
Then, less than 10 years before Edward and Samuel boarded the train bound for Carlisle, the government passed the Dawes Act, forcing tribes into individual property ownership and fundamentally disrupting life for the Winnebago yet again.
At boarding schools like Carlisle, students faced documented physical, sexual and emotional abuse, as well as disease, malnourishment and overcrowding.
In its initial analysis, the government recorded more than 500 child deaths at boarding schools, a number expected to soar. At Carlisle alone, roughly 230 students died on campus.
Like Edward and Samuel, many of those children have been lost to tribes for decades.
“I can’t even fathom what they were feeling,” Thomas-Bear said. “Not only are you not home, but then they take your ways of how you fed yourself and how you take care of yourself and your culture and religion. And then at the end, take your children. I don’t think I’d survive that.”
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