KVIG Informative

In September, a Shoshone girl who died at a Pennsylvania boarding school in 1900 was reburied at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. Her return shows how much of the federal boarding school record is still being pieced together, including at Nevada’s own Stewart Indian School.

On May 28, 2026, the U.S. Army’s Office of Army Cemeteries published notice in the Federal Register that it would disinter the remains of 12 Native American students buried at the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania, at the request of their families and Tribes. The notice set Sept. 1, 2026, as the start of the work. One name on the list was Della Atkins of the Shoshone Paiute Tribes.

According to a statement from the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, Della Tuscarora Atkins was 17 when she arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on Dec. 12, 1900. She died 13 days later, on Christmas Day, from complications of advanced brain cancer. The Tribes said misspellings of her name kept her family from ever being notified of her death.

Her descendants brought her remains home in September 2026, and she was reburied on the reservation, which straddles the Nevada-Idaho border. The Tribes said it was the first time a relative’s remains had come back to them from a boarding school. The Office of Army Cemeteries says the remains of 58 children buried at Carlisle have been returned to their communities since 2017.

The federal accounting Carlisle operated from 1879 to 1918 as the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school, and it became the model for a national system built to separate Native children from their languages and families. In June 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to document that system. The department released its first report in May 2022 and its second and final volume in July 2024.

Volume II, submitted by Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, counts 417 federal boarding schools in 37 states or then-territories. It identifies at least 973 Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children who died while attending them. The report states that the true number is higher, and it lists hundreds of students whose Tribal affiliation remains unknown.

Stewart Indian School Nevada’s largest chapter of that history sits south of Carson City. The Stewart Indian School opened in 1890 and closed in 1980. Today the campus houses the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, which state law places inside the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs. Its director, Joshua Bonde, is a citizen of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, and admission is free on weekdays, according to the department.

The record at Stewart is still filling in. In an October 2025 report to the department’s commissioners, museum staff said they had worked with Bureau of Indian Affairs staff to recover about 55 boxes of archival material tied to the school. A hearing record published by the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs states that nearly 100 unmarked graves have been identified in the school cemetery. State law also sets aside a dedicated account to repair and maintain the campus’s historic buildings.

The Army’s online listing of Native students buried at Carlisle remains public, and families can check it for relatives whose names may have been recorded incorrectly, as Della’s was. The Federal Register will carry notice of the next round of disinterments. In Nevada, the boxes recovered for Stewart and the unmarked graves in its cemetery point to the same unanswered question that Carlisle answered for one family: who the children were, and where they belong.

This history can be painful to read. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.