Bone by bone, two archaeologists lifted the 130-year-old skeletal remains of a Native American girl from the shallow grave in a roadside cemetery. A hand bone, a rib, a chunk of vertebrae and, finally, her skull.
Almeda Heavy Hair had been forcibly removed from her family and the Gros Ventre tribe when she was 12 and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of hundreds of institutions operated by the U.S. government to eradicate Native Americans’ culture and assimilate them into White society.
She died in 1894, four years after arriving, without ever seeing her family again. Now, 19 of Almeda’s relatives and others from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana — some crying, some praying as they watched her bones being exhumed — had come to take Almeda home.
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