School Works To Return Native Remains

Philadelphia – The School District of Philadelphia is working to repatriate Native American skeletal remains found in a high school classroom closet this summer.

A letter sent to parents of Central High School students Friday said the “human skeletal item” was previously used as a teaching aid and dated back to the 1850s.

The district consulted with the Department of Interior, Temple University and other experts about how to handle the remains, Evelyn Nunez, the district’s chief of schools wrote in the letter to parents.

“The District is also working with these partners to return this person, who has been identified as a male Native American, to his home tribe,” she said.

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Judge Halts Sale Of Apartment Complex Where Black Graves Were Buried

Bethesda, MD – A community coalition has provided “overwhelming evidence” that a portion of a suburban Washington apartment complex was used as a burial ground for freed Black slaves and their descendants and “many bodies likely still remain on the property,” a Maryland judge ruled Monday in a case by the group to thwart the sale of the property.

The Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission’s pending $50 million sale of Westwood Tower in Bethesda to a local investment firm, Charger Ventures, drew intense public opposition over the summer and led to the lawsuit filed by the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition. The group had furnished historical accounts indicating the gravesite — known as Moses Cemetery — was paved over with asphalt for a parking lot when the apartments went up in the late 1960s.

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More Skeletons In Obama’s Closet

I recently witnessed the exhumation of human remains from a mass grave that contains more than 200 bodies. It was a profound and profoundly disturbing experience. Each body in this grave represents an unnecessary and unjust death, a murder, and each of these more than 200 murders can never be forgotten or forgiven.

There is a message that cries out from these bones that must be heard and understood, and acted upon by all good people in the world. Otherwise, history will repeat itself, and again, the killers and the killing will continue, and more mass graves will be filled.

After seven years of war, a war that continues to this day, these 200 bodies are being exhumed from a mass grave that the war forced them into back in the summer of 2014, during the heaviest attacks and siege by the Ukrainian “punishers” against the people of Lugansk.

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Rosebud Sioux Youth Council Returns To Carlisle Indian School

Carlisle, Pa. — Twenty-three-year-old Christopher Eagle Bear from the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota has been growing out his hair since he visited the site of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School six years ago.

The trip, made by the Rosebud Sioux youth council in 2015, sparked a group of young tribal members to initiate a tribe-backed resolution to bring home their nine ancestors who died at the school as children some 140 years ago.

Six years after his initial visit, Eagle Bear’s hair falls down below the waist of his traditional regalia. He is back in Carlisle this week to bring his relatives home.

The Army’s Office of Army Cemeteries, which oversees the former school grounds, has agreed to exhume the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children and return them to the tribe on Wednesday, July 14.

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Kamloops discovery prompts call for framework to investigate mass graves

The discovery of a mass grave at a former Kamloops residential school highlights the need for a formal, legal and human rights framework to investigate similar sites in Canada, says a B.C. legal scholar and advocate.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond heads the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, and formerly served as the province’s advocate for children and youth.

“A mass grave is a crime scene, it is not a historic site or a heritage site,” Turpel-Lafond told Global News.

“It is well and past the time that Canada and provinces, they need to stop treating the finding of human remains of Indigenous people as sort of a heritage issue.”

The Kamloops Indian Residential School is but one of many where Turpel-Lafond says Indigenous people have reported children disappearing, but have been given little or no state support to investigate.

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