Army plans to return four Alaska children's remains from Carlisle

The Army was scheduled to begin disinterring four Alaska Native children from a Pennsylvania cemetery on Tuesday, Sept. 1. The remains will return to families at government expense, more than 120 years after the children died at a federal boarding school.

The four are part of a group of 12 Native American children being removed from the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery. The Office of Army Cemeteries named them in a Federal Register notice published May 28: Mabel Stock, Edward Angalook, Lucy Spaulding and Tummassak, which the notice also renders as Tomicock.

Nine Alaska children are buried at the cemetery. Three were repatriated earlier. Two remain, and the school's own register lists no grave location for one of them.

The Army says it is honoring the requests of family members and Native American tribes. According to the notice, the closest living descendant of each of the 12 children submitted a written request for disinterment. The Army will disinter, transport and reinter the remains in cemeteries chosen by families and tribes, at government expense, though the notice does not name them. The deadline for objections was July 1.

The Army conducts the work under Army Regulation 290-5, which requires a written request from a lineal descendant, and says it does so in accordance with NAGPRA savings clauses, provisions preserving rights under other laws. Earlier notices said flatly that NAGPRA did not apply because the remains are not part of a collection. The Native American Rights Fund reports that the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and the Spirit Lake Tribe, in an earlier Plan of Action with the Army, insisted on disclaimers stating they had not waived their NAGPRA rights and did not agree NAGPRA fails to apply.

The school's cemetery register, maintained by the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, records dates and plots the Army notice omits. Tomiclock died April 8, 1900, in plot E-19. Mabel Stack died Aug. 14, 1904, in plot E-12. Lucy Spaulding died March 25, 1905, in plot E-11. Edward Angalook died Sept. 24, 1905, in plot D-39. All died within five and a half years of one another.

The two records disagree on names. The Army writes Stock where the register writes Stack, and Tummassak, bracketed as Tomicock, where the register writes only Tomiclock. The register also identifies Mabel Stack as Tsimshian, placing her in Southeast Alaska, while the Army calls all four simply Alaska Natives.

The two Alaska children who will remain at Carlisle after this round are Laublock, who died Sept. 15, 1899, in plot A-09, and Henry Rose, who died Aug. 4, 1907, with his plot listed as Unknown. The records do not say why.

The Army corrected its own notice on June 5, changing one name from Susie Davis to Susie King, a child of the Grand Traverse Band. None of the four Alaska names changed.

Alaska children have come home from Carlisle before, but in smaller numbers. One, Sophia Tetoff, returned in the April 2021 round. Two, Anatasia Achwak and Anna Vereskin, returned in February 2022. Four in one round is more than those two rounds combined. The February 2022 notice cited Army Regulation 290-5 alone, but since May 2023 the Army has also cited NAGPRA savings clauses at 25 U.S. Code section 3009, as this year's notice does.

The Federal Register carries 11 notices concerning the cemetery, running from June 2017 to June 2026, with disinterments announced nearly every year since 2017. The Army counts 58 students returned. In December 2024 the cemetery became part of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument.

This account rests on the federal record and the school's register. No family, tribal government or Alaska Native organization speaks in those documents, and nothing identifies the communities the four children are returning to.