The Fight to Repatriate Indigenous Students Who Died at Boarding Schools

On March 31, the Department of Government Efficiency announced cuts of $1.6 million to projects designed to preserve the stories of federal Indian boarding school victims and provide healing to their descendants.

These grants—canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities—included $282,000 that would have gone to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Commission and enabled the digitization of more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records. With this program, Native families researching ancestors who went to government boarding schools would have been able to easily access digitized copies of their relative’s school records, including the cause and date of the relative’s death.

It was not infrequent that children died at these schools. An investigation commissioned by former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found at least 973 children had died and been buried at Indian boarding schools during the program’s 150-year history. Many more are thought to be buried in unmarked graves.

The legacy of historical and intergenerational trauma caused by the boarding school era upon victims, their families, and their communities echoes down generations. Only by hearing the stories of boarding school victims can descendant families process and understand what happened to them and hopefully heal the wounds of this country’s tragic experiment in forced assimilation.

The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) issued a statement condemning the Trump administration’s decision. “The action is not just a bureaucratic decision conjured in ignorance,” NCAI President Mark Macarro wrote. “It is a betrayal of our communities, our survivors, and our sacred responsibility to the children who never made it home.”

A Forgotten Victim’s Story

Eddie Spott was just 14 when he was ripped from his home and family on the Puyallup Reservation in Tacoma, Washington, in 1894 and taken across the country to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

He was no doubt taken by train, a trip that would have lasted several days. He and his family would have had no choice in the matter. Across the U.S. and Canada, Indian agents came to reservations every year and illegally took children without their parent’s consent, often by force or in secret, and shipped them off to one of the more than 400 Indian boarding and mission schools established across the country.

The Carlisle boarding school, which was run by the U.S. Army, was going to train Spott to be white. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Carlisle founder Capt. Richard H. Pratt famously said at an 1892 convention, just two years before Spott’s arrival at the school. This mandate meant Spott could not wear his own clothes, eat his traditional foods, or even speak his own language. He would be punished harshly for doing so. Perhaps worst of all, he was permanently separated from his family.

We can only guess what Spott was thinking while traveling the 2,700 miles to Carlisle. Traveling alone or with strangers, each click of the railroad tracks taking him farther from his home, he may have wondered, “What did I do wrong? What is it about me that they think is so bad? Doesn’t my family love me anymore? All I know is that I must survive.”

Two years later, Spott was dead. Official records indicate he fell victim to the “white plague” of tuberculosis that was rampant at Indian boarding schools. He was buried in the school’s cemetery, forgotten and alone.

Spott’s descendants believe his death was part of a plot to steal the family’s land allotment. His siblings all died around the same time under questionable circumstances, leaving no heir to the property when their father died. This would have made the land eligible for sale to whites. Thousands of acres of Puyallup land on which Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the city of Tacoma now stand were stolen around the same time from the original Native allotment owners.

Of course, it’s now impossible to prove such a hypothesis, but in light of recently released historical retellings such as Killers of the Flower Moon, the theory cannot be dismissed.

One descendant, however, found evidence of Spott in online records and fought to repatriate his remains back to the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery in 2023.

A Lost Ancestor Discovered

Y-askdt Spirithawk, whose government name is Tiauna Augkhopinee, is an enrolled member of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and grew up listening to family stories that her grandmother Ramona Bennett told her.

“I would sit and listen to her for hours,” Spirithawk says. “We would talk about history, and she would tell me all of the stories about our family and all of the important names that she said that I would know in the future that I need to remember.”

Bennett was a leader in the successful Washington State Fish Wars of the 1960s and early ’70s and also prominent in the Red Power movement of the 1970s. She was an early member of the Puyallup tribal council and would later serve as its chairperson. Bennett was raised by her mother, Gertrude McKinney, who is also a boarding school survivor.

McKinney attended the Puyallup Indian School from the time she was 5. The experience was so traumatic that she later forbade her children from speaking Twulshootseed, the Puyallup tribal language, because she associated it with punishment. But she always made sure her children knew they were from a strong bloodline.

Spirithawk, who is now 27, says she was maybe 7 when she first heard about boarding schools. From a young age, she had a deep interest in the institutions and dedicated a lot of time to researching them on her computer.

“I felt like I had a calling to learn more about the boarding school system,” she says. “I remember thinking that boarding schools were atrocious. How could the government do this to these kids? And how could these adults follow suit and actually abuse these children … and strip them of everything that makes them Indian? I remember being heartbroken about it.”

One night while Spirithawk was doing online research of her ancestors Marcellus and Mary Ann Spott, she kept coming across an article about a young man named Edward Spott who was buried at Carlisle boarding school. At first she assumed there was no connection to her family, because it was clear across the country and a name she’d never heard her family speak of.

“It must have been about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning when I clicked on the article and discovered the young man’s parents were named Marcellus and Mary Ann Spott,” she remembers. “I showed the article to my grandma and said, ‘Is this our cousin? Is this our relative?’ And grandma went, ‘Oh my goodness! Yes!’”

Y-askdt’s Quest to Bring Edward Spott Home

The Carlisle school operated for 30 years, housing thousands of students from more than 100 distinct cultures, before it closed in 1918. A century later, in 2017, the cemetery began the process of repatriating the remains of Native children back to their home tribes and families. 

Spirithawk contacted Carlisle and inquired about repatriating Edward Spott’s remains. They sent her the necessary paperwork to certify that she and her family were his closest living relatives. The Office of Army Cemeteries approved Spirithawk’s request and paid to have Spirithawk and three additional members of her family, including her aunt and research partner Amber Taylor, flown to Pennsylvania for the disinterment.

The planned return of Edward Spott to Spirithawk and her family in 2023 was part of the Army’s sixth repatriation project. The family intended to have a tribal repatriation ceremony at the cemetery to welcome their long-lost relative back into the arms of the Puyallup Tribe. Later, they would take his remains away from Carlisle, finally rescuing Spott from this factory of cultural genocide.

“The Army was very helpful and very respectful through the whole process,” Spirithawk says. “They were as kind as they could be. They fought for us and beside us. It’s important to remember that they’re not the ones who committed these atrocities.”

Just before the day of the repatriation, Spirithawk and her husband Solo Augkhopinee tested positive for COVID-19 and were not allowed to attend the exhumation. They could only stand outside the fence of the cemetery and watch from a distance. Instead, Spirithawk’s Uncle Muck, whose government name is Michael Hall, led the tribal repatriation ceremony.

The Heartbreaking Discovery Inside Edward Spott’s Grave

The Army examined the remains the next day and discovered them to be that of a girl who was between 16 and 22 years old at the time of her death. The headstones were purportedly mixed up when the school moved the cemetery to a different location in 1927.

“It was the worst news imaginable,” Spirithawk remembers. “It felt like boarding school trauma in its fullest effect.”

The whereabouts of Edward Spott’s body and the identity of the young woman found in his grave are currently unknown. Spirithawk hopes the school’s medical and dental records will help identify the girl, but the possibility of finding Spott’s remains among the other graves isn’t as good.

In October 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the government’s role in the boarding school era, calling it a “blot on American history.” In December, he designated Carlisle as a national monument to preserve its history. But links to both the apology and the designation have since been removed from the White House website. 

The Trump administration has enacted cuts that severely limit the ability of the descendants of boarding school victims to access the information they need to heal from more than a century of intergenerational trauma. The cost saved by those cuts amounts to one-half of 1% of the cost of Trump’s planned June 14 military birthday parade, currently estimated at $45 million.

The work Spirithawk and her family did was not for nothing. Together they brought Edward Spott home, not physically, but in every other way. His life has re-entered the family history, honored and remembered instead of remaining alone and forgotten in a far-off place. His spirit was welcomed back through prayers, songs, ceremony, and most importantly, the love of his family.