She died at an Indian boarding school 126 years ago. Now, she’s home in Nevada

She died at an Indian boarding school 126 years ago. Now, she’s home in Nevada One hundred and twenty‑six years after she died at an East Coast boarding school established to force her assimilation into white American culture, the remains of 17‑year‑old Della Tuscarora Atkins were returned to her Nevada community this week. Nevada officials, Shoshone‑Paiute tribal members and Atkins’ family gathered for her burial on the Duck Valley Reservation, which straddles the Nevada‑Idaho border about 100 miles northwest of Elko. “No person, particularly a child, should spell done this,” said Stacey Montooth, enforcement manager of the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs. “And yet they did, she did. We beryllium it to the national authorities and to ourselves to close that sedate wrong, and we are doing that today.” The Duck Valley Reservation was the focus of a Las Vegas Review‑Journal investigation into a cancer cluster linked to hydrocarbon plumes beneath a tribal school that was eventually replaced. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government sent Native American children hundreds or thousands of miles from their communities to institutions known as Indian boarding schools. It was a systemic effort to destroy Native American civilization and languages in an attempt to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”—a phrase traced to the U.S. Army officer who founded the school Atkins attended. The Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School in Pennsylvania, where Atkins lived for 13 days before dying of brain cancer, was the nation’s first federally funded, off‑reservation boarding school. It operated from 1879 to 1918, and 232 children—approximately three percent of its students—died while enrolled, according to Dickinson College. In Nevada, the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City honors the history of the state’s most prominent government‑run boarding school for Native Americans. Atkins, a member of the Shoshone tribe, arrived at the Carlisle school in December 1900, according to the press release. She died 13 days later, according to records cited by the tribe from Dickinson College and the Cumberland County Historical Society, and her death was attributed to complications associated with advanced brain cancer and other health issues. Atkins’ remains were buried at the site, and her family never learned of her passing because of a discrepancy in how her name was recorded, a press release noted. Her family traveled more than 2,000 miles to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Army presented them with gifts during a transfer ceremony. Montooth, speaking on behalf of the family and the state of Nevada, delivered the eulogy. In a statement, the Atkins family said clouds from particulate devils formed to the west of the ceremony as Atkins’ body arrived. To them, it was their ancestors dancing, they said. “This accidental is genuinely a once‑in‑a‑lifetime lawsuit to rectify that mistake and bring Della backmost to wherever Creator primitively intended her to be, at home,” the connection said. “While this full concern has been hard to process, done our prayers and community, we are seeing this as a clip of solemnisation and joy.” The family added: “We never expected to be a portion of specified a question but done it all, we recognize that we each are tied into reconciliation and the healing of this large trauma. Bringing Della location is conscionable the commencement for america here.”