Nearly forgotten: The Puyallup boy buried 2,700 miles from home

In 2022, Spirithawk, whose government name is Tiauna Aghkhopinee, was researching the life of her great-great-great-grandfather, Marcellus Spot, who died in 1903, when she came across a death notice for Edward Spott. The short paragraph, published in a Pennsylvania newspaper on April 21, 1896, stated that he was a student at the Carlisle Indian School.

At first the death notice held little interest for her. Edward’s last name was spelled differently from her ancestor’s, and he died clear across the country, 2,700 miles away.

Out of curiosity, she looked up the boy’s records in the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. To her astonishment, she discovered he was Marcellus’s son.

Had she not listened to her instincts, Edward’s existence would have remained forgotten, lost to a family whose history was already scarred by a legacy of Indian boarding school abuse.

“The first time I remember hearing about boarding schools I had to have been about seven years old,” Spirithawk recalls. “My grandma was telling me about some of my great-grandma’s experiences here at Puyallup Indian School.”

Spirithawk’s great-grandmother Gertrude McKinney was so traumatized by her childhood at the Puyallup Indian School that she forbade her children from speaking the tribe’s language, Twulshootseed, at home. The nuns who ran the school brutally punished any student caught speaking it, and this negative association never left her.

More connections to her family’s boarding school history came as Spirithawk researched Edward’s immediate family. She discovered his brother Sammy had been sent to the Forest Grove Indian Training School in Oregon.

But what stood out the most to her were all the suspicious deaths that occurred in Edward’s family around the same time. By 1903, everyone in his immediate family had died in accidents, purportedly involving alcohol abuse. His mother supposedly drowned in a puddle of water after falling off a wagon drunk, according to a local news article. His brother died after being hit by a streetcar, supposedly while drunk. His father, Marcellus, died in police custody after being arrested for public drunkenness.

These deaths occurred around the same time that legislation was passed altering the rights of Puyallup land owners. Previously, in 1873, the reservation was surveyed and broken into separate plots. These allotments, which could not be sold, were given to individual Puyallup families in the hope that it would break up their communal lifestyle.

Tribal factions had been debating for years about whether or not to pressure the government to allow individual Puyallup land owners to sell their allotments. White land developers watched the debate closely and prepared for the day when the opportunity arose for them to steal Puyallup land through shady land deals.

In 1904, Congress passed legislation allowing allottees to sell their land. The deaths of Edward and his family cleared the way for their allotment to be absorbed by the city.

The combination of legislation that turned communal reservation land into individual, saleable plots and the tuberculosis epidemic in boarding schools decimated Native communities all over the country.

By 1915, fewer than a dozen Puyallup families still owned tribal land, according to the Puyallup Tribe’s Historic Preservation Department.

After receiving some advice from the tribe’s Historic Preservation Department, Spirithawk contacted the Office of Army Cemeteries and began the process of requesting the repatriation of Edward’s remains.

The Office of Army Cemeteries paid for Spirithawk and some family members to come to Carlisle and assist in the disinterment. Spirithawk’s father, uncle and aunt led the group in Puyallup songs to welcome Edward, whom they now call Eddie, back into the tribe.

As his casket was lifted from the grave it felt to Spirithawk as if the intergenerational trauma that had lingered over their family for over a century broke free from its prison and they could now physically see it: a young boy 16 years old trapped in a foreign land inside a box.

“The next day we got a call from the Army saying they’d examined the remains and determined they belonged to a young girl between the ages of 16 and 22,” Spirithawk says. “It was the worst news imaginable.”

The legacy of atrocities their family suffered had one more barb with which to jab them.

Misburials and unmarked graves are common at the school’s cemetery, according to Renea Yates, director of the Office of Army Cemeteries, who says the Army took over the property from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1918.

“What we do know is there was some cemetery mismanagement under the Bureau of Indian Affairs and under the Department of the Interior,” Yates says.

When the cemetery was moved to a new location in 1927, “no attempt was made to organize the graves,” according to a 2017 Army research report. The report speculated that “reinterment probably took place in the order the remains arrived at the relocation site” and said the placement of the remains “appears random.” No one knows where Edward’s remains are, nor the identity of the girl found in his grave.

“Although I felt bad about Eddie, I also felt bad for that young girl,” Spirithawk recalls. “She was in pretty bad shape, just a body in a box still wearing her boarding school uniform.”

Spirithawk donated one of her own ribbon dresses to redress the girl and also placed a few ceremonial items in the coffin with her before she was reburied.

Spirithawk doesn’t blame the Army or the staff of the Office of Army Cemeteries for the mix-up.

“It’s important to remember they aren’t responsible for these atrocities,” Spirithawk admits. “They happened a hundred years ago. The current staff treated us with respect. I have nothing bad to say about them.”

Not everyone is as forgiving. In January 2024, the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska sued the Office of Army Cemeteries for refusing their request to repatriate the remains of tribal members Samuel Gilbert and Edward Hensley.

The tribe invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to get the remains returned. The Army refused, arguing that NAGPRA, which normally applies to museums holding Native artifacts, does not apply to Army cemeteries. According to Army protocol, only “closest living relatives” can request repatriation. In August 2024, a federal court dismissed the case. The tribe has appealed.

Spirithawk visits her family’s plot in the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery every month. A special place is set aside for Edward’s grave. The Army has promised to return him eventually, along with all other stolen children.

As of June 2025, the remains of 42 children have been returned to their families, according to Yates. An additional 17 repatriations are currently in process. The unknown number of unmarked graves makes it difficult to estimate when all the remains will be repatriated.

For Spirithawk, the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery is not only a place to remember the dead. It is also a place of healing and rebirth. Her two daughters will grow up knowing their family’s history, not only the atrocities, but also how their family fought to overcome them.