The "Going Home At Last: Carlisle Indian Industrial School" Story

Foreword:  My stories today and tomorrow may sound very similar to you, yet they happened close to 100 years apart.  Both have ties to the area in the United States where I live.  Both are very distressing.  And, I'm sorry to say, may sound as if they just happened.  That's because something very similar just did happen in the United States.  Children taken away from their parents along our Southern border for no apparent reason other than to try and prove a point that our government can do it if they want.  There are still a few hundred children that will more than likely never be reunited with their families.  How sad!  Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of those children?  I can't.  And, I'm lucky I was never a pawn in the game of politics as these poor children are.  Today's story dates back to 1879 while tomorrow's story dates back to the mid-1950s.  See if one or both sound eerily like what happened in 2018.

I wonder how many of the 186 Indian children's
parents ever knew about their child.

It was an ordinary day.  That is for most except young George Ell who had laid in bed for three weeks, dying from a burst blood vessel in his lungs.  He died on April 7, 1891 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and his classmates followed his coffin to the nearby cemetery to see the young Blackfoot child be laid in a grave.  He was known as kind, faithful and true.  A year later his family in Montana was notified!  He was said to have been the 109th Indian child to die and be buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, just over an hour drive from my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Many more would die after him and be buried next to him at the school designed to "solve" the Indian problem.  Seems our Government, as well as the government of the country to our north, has tried more than once to destroy cultures that they felt were harmful to our country.  Harmful to whom, though?  

Stolen from their parents and brought to Carlisle!

 His ashes were recently returned to his family.  Now, more bodies are being exhumed and returned to their relatives, all due to the recent furor over our current President's policies.  Indian activists say the trauma being inflicted on current families along the southern border mirror what they had to endure years and years ago.  I have known Carlisle for years as the home of our country's Army War College as well as the home of the Annual Carlisle Corvette Show in August.  

Rows of graves, many marked "Unknown".

I have driven in caravans with my '87 Vette past the War College, but until a few days ago didn't realize the horror and pain that happened at the place to the Indian population that roamed our nation before we arrived and tried to annihilate them.  Now there are privacy fences around the cemetery.  For the past two months remains have been exhumed so they can be returned to their rightful homes.  

The Carlisle School was supposed to be one of the best Indian Schools where Native Americans were snatched from their families so they could have the "Wildness" in them removed.  Thousand of boys and girls as young as 4 years old were taken by police to various schools across our country.  Wow!  Finally, Mr. Irvin Dale Ell, a distant relative of young George Ell, who recently claimed the remains of George from Carlisle said, "We're taking this child.  All the hurt will be over once we bury him at home."  For me, it just might be starting.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.