CARLISLE, Pa. _ Mary Kininnook died three days after her 14th birthday, weak and struggling to breathe, in a hospital bed at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
But precisely where her body lies, no one knows.
Twice, family members traveled here from Alaska, searching the school cemetery and checking the name on every headstone, only to learn she was likely buried in one of the graves marked "unknown."
"I had to call my mom _ 'Mom, we can't find her. Nobody knows where she is,'" said Eleanor Hadden, an Alaska anthropologist and Kininnook's great-niece. "My mom's crying. I'm crying. We were crying with the pain they must have felt when they learned she had died."
Now tribal elders in Alaska say they want to find, identify and return Kininnook's remains to her ancestral home _ portending a conflict with the Army _ as part of the latest and largest demand in an American Indian movement for repatriation.
Alaskan leaders seek to have 14 children returned, including Henry Rose, also presumed buried as an unknown.
"We can almost positively identify Mary Kininnook" as an unknown, said Bob Sam, a Sitka tribal councilman and repatriation leader. "We're going to make her case a priority."
Army officials who control the cemetery, set on the grounds of what is now the Army War College, have pledged to return remains to Indian tribes, but say they will not disturb the 13 graves marked unknown.
Asked if that decision might be revisited _ and, perhaps, DNA samples taken to aid families who search now or in the future _ spokesman Dave Foster said that "until the U.S. Army meets with representatives of the tribes and villages, we cannot provide a definitive answer."
Generally, he said, the Army will work with all tribes "toward a successful resolution, allowing families the ability to determine a final resting place for these young men and women."
Army and Indian representatives may meet next month in Fairbanks.
The cemetery contains the graves of nearly 200 native children who died at the school in a turn-of-the-century experiment in forced assimilation, a cultural genocide that continues to torment tribes and families.
The Alaskan effort opens a door on a little-known aspect of the school, which from 1879 to 1918 claimed more than 10,000 children from across the West, South, and Northeast _ but also from the frozen North.
In the 1880s, Alaska saw a gold rush on souls, as Christian missionaries converted native peoples and helped send about 130 children to Carlisle.
The Alaskans traveled the farthest, sailing 700 miles to Seattle or another Pacific port, then going 2,700 miles by train to Carlisle, the nation's first federally funded, off-reservation boarding school.
Children as young as 4 were systematically stripped of their names, languages, religions, and traditions, and taught that the ways of their people were savage and wrong.
Those who died were buried near the athletic fields. But over time, wooden markers rotted, and in 1927 the cemetery was relocated in a muddled excavation.
One boy appears to have been named on two separate headstones. Others were named on none.
Today the only stone to mark the short life of Mary Kininnook stands 3,300 miles away, in Saxman, Alaska, a white spire of remembrance erected by a father and mother who had no body to bury.
