A Century After Deaths, Native American Students Return Home to Wyoming

CARLISLE, Pa. (AP) — A team of experts is poised to start exhuming the bodies of three Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania.

The disinterment process will start Tuesday morning at a military cemetery on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks.

The federal government is paying to dig up the remains of Little Plume, Horse and Little Chief and return them to Fremont County, Wyoming.

The three Northern Arapaho children were also known as Hayes Vanderbilt Friday, Horace Washington and Dickens Nor.

They were 10, 14 and 15 when they died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, likely of pneumonia or some other disease.

They are among 181 Native Americans buried in the cemetery. Officials expect more exhumations and returns will eventually follow.