Remains return home: Children who died in Native American boarding schools buried in Hays

FORT BELKNAP INDIAN RESERVATION — About 100 people gathered in Hays, Montana, on Friday to welcome home and bury three children who died while at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the late 1800s — Bishop L. Shields, 17, Almeda Heavy Hair, 16, and John Bull, 16. From the 1800s to the 1970s, Native children were taken from their homes and forced to attend Indian boarding schools, where they were emotionally, physically and sexually abused.

The explicit mission of these schools was cultural genocide. Some children died at these schools; some remain unaccounted for. Tribes suffered language and culture loss as a result, and historical trauma persists in Native communities today.



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