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

More than 120 years after four Alaska Native children died at a federal boarding school in Pennsylvania, the Army began bringing them home this week — disinterring their remains from the Carlisle Barracks cemetery to return them to their families at government expense.

The four are Mabel Stock, Edward Angalook, Lucy Spaulding and a child the Army records as Tummassak. They are among 12 Native American children being removed from the cemetery this round, each at the written request of their closest living descendant, the Army said. It will transport and reinter the remains in cemeteries the families and tribes choose.

The four Alaska children died within five and a half years of one another, between 1900 and 1905, at a school that took Native children from their communities across the country. The Carlisle Indian School's own cemetery register records the details — death dates and grave plots — that the Army's official notice leaves out. The two records don't fully agree: the Army writes "Stock" where the register writes "Stack," and the register identifies one of the children, Mabel Stack, as Tsimshian, from Southeast Alaska, while the Army lists all four simply as Alaska Natives.

Alaska children have been returned from Carlisle before, but never this many at once — one in 2021, two in 2022, and now four. Two more Alaska children will still remain buried there after this round, and the school's records list no known grave for one of them.

There has been friction over the legal footing. The Army has said the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act doesn't apply here because the remains aren't part of a museum collection. But tribes have pushed back: in an earlier agreement with the Army, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake Tribe insisted on language stating they had not waived their rights under that law and did not accept that it fails to apply, according to the Native American Rights Fund.

The returns are part of a long reckoning. The Federal Register carries 11 notices about the cemetery since 2017, with children disinterred nearly every year; the Army counts 58 students returned so far. In December 2024, the site became the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument.

The federal record and the school's register are the only voices in this account. No family, tribe or Alaska Native organization speaks in those documents, and nothing in them says which communities the four children are coming home to.