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This story was originally published by ICT.

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

While everyone else in the household was asleep, Nyché Andrew worked late into the night at the computer.

An Indigenous research specialist with the Alaska Native Heritage Center, she’d been assigned the task of finding the origins and descendants of the Alaska Native students still buried at the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Historical archives and the Carlisle school records were often a labyrinth of frustrations, with numerous dead ends. Then she stumbled across a photo of one of the Alaska students, Tummassak, in the Sheldon Jackson Collection at the Presbyterian Historical Society.

“I stared in awe at her photograph because it instantly reminded me of the only photo of my great-great-grandmother, Mary Agugaq Avessuk,” Andrew, Skavaq Sivulliuqti (Yup’ik/Iñupiaq), originally from Anchorage but now living in New Jersey, told ICT.

What caught her attention was not simply the family resemblance or the way they both fixed their eyes away from the camera, but the tavluġun, a tattoo on her chin signifying a young woman’s transition into maturity. It was the same tavluġun she had seen in photos of her great-great-grandmother.

Then came the sudden realization that the young woman she’d been researching was actually a relative.

“Tummassak was a very special find,” she said. “As a researcher, I never anticipated finding my family members.”

The next morning, Andrew showed the photo to her mother, Jacqueline Agugaq Walluk.

“She softened at the sight of an Iñupiaq girl with a tattoo like Mary’s and remarked on how beautiful Tummassak was,” Andrew said. “We agreed that she looked incredibly similar to my sister, Farrell Agathluk Asiaq Stoudt.”

Tummassak is among more than 100 Native students still buried at the Carlisle cemetery, including 11 from Alaska, but she will soon be headed home.

Final Journey: Carlisle begins its ninth repatriation of students who never made it home

Family members and community leaders from Alaska are set to arrive in Carlisle on Thursday, Sept. 24, for the disinterment and later a ceremonial transfer of the remains of Tummassak and three other Alaska Native students whose remains will be repatriated this year – Mabel Booth, whose last name is listed as Stack or Stock in school records; Edward Angalook; and Lucy Spaulding.

The repatriations are among 12 this year from the Carlisle cemetery. The remains of three students from the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes were returned home to Montana in early September, and the remains of another five students from five different tribes are set to be repatriated by mid-October.

Officials with the Office of Army Cemeteries, which oversees the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery where the children are buried, have not released details about which of the remaining five students have been repatriated so far.

Twenty-two graves in the cemetery remain marked, however, as “unknown” because the children’s remains cannot be identified, the result of a mix-up that likely occurred when the cemetery was moved in 1927.

Benjamin Jacuk, Dena’ina/Sugpiaq, the director of research at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, said the Office of Army Cemeteries reached out to the center in 2024 for help identifying family members of the children buried there.

“A lot of the times really the best places to look are more local,” Jacuk told ICT. “What research is, at the end of the day, is making sure that we’re uncovering every stone to figure out how to be able to bring our families back.”

‘Another death’

Tummassak was 12 years old when she arrived at the Carlisle school on Nov. 14, 1897, and died of tuberculosis less than three years later on April 8, 1900. She is listed as Tomicock on her gravestone and as Tomiclock in Carlisle archives.

The school newspaper, The Indian Helper, recorded the details of Tummassak’s final moments in the April 13, 1900, issue.

“We are grieved to record the death of another of our Alaska pupils — Tomicock (Tummassak),” the article stated.

“She was patient, gentle and brave. She bore her illness in silence. Her smile was ready even when too weak to talk. She was conscious to the end,” the newspaper reported. “She asked Miss Barr to hold her and breathed her last while resting in those kindly arms, ever ready to help one in distress. Annebuck was her chosen friend and close companion, and the bereft child has the sympathy of all who knew the tender and sisterly feeling between the two.”

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated from 1879 to 1918. Established on a vacant military base, hundreds of miles from the influences and traditions of most tribes, it was the first federally funded, off-reservation Native American boarding school in the United States and served as a model for schools across the U.S. and Canada.

Almost 8,000 Native American and Alaska Native students attended the school, part of an oppressive government attempt at forcefully assimilating Native students into White civilization. Its aim was to change them forever by cutting links to their family, language and culture.

Records indicate that 232 students died while enrolled at the school, and many did not return home. Prior to 2017, when repatriations began at Carlisle, there were 186 students buried in the cemetery. Another 37 were returned to their homes for burial, nine died while on the school’s outing program and were buried near those locations, and three died while enroute home from the school, according to Jim Gerencser, associate dean for archives and special collections at Dickinson College and the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

Of all the students who were shipped to Carlisle, none had to travel as long and as far to get there as the Alaska Native students.

The first two Alaska Native students were brought to Carlisle by Sheldon Jackson, who managed the western states and Alaska for the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. He was also named the general agent of education for Alaska.

He took Fred Harris (Ko-woot-ke-ish) and Henry Phillips (Ka-ka-ish), to Carlisle in December 1887 to learn the trades of tin smithing and printing.

On Sept. 20, 1897, a group of six Iñupiat youths, including Tummassak, boarded the US Revenue Cutter Bear, an early version of an ice breaker, at the Teller Reindeer Station in Port Clarence for transport to Seattle in Puget Sound after a side trip to Siberia. Following a 2,700-mile, cross-country train ride, they arrived in Carlisle almost two months later on Nov. 14, 1897, where they were photographed in their parkas.

Though they escaped the “Great Deaths” in Alaska when flu and other illnesses wiped out entire villages, they were not as lucky in Carlisle. Laublock, or Lablok, the only male in the group, died on Sept. 15, 1899, and Tummassak died the following year. Student Cooki Glook, also known as Kokiglook or Cookiglook, died on Jan. 4, 1904.  All died of tuberculosis, known as “consumption” at the time, though Cooki Glook also suffered from rheumatism of the heart, according to school records.

Laublock and Cooki Glook remain buried in the school cemetery and, according to Jacuk, are expected to be returned home in 2027.

Over the years, 127 Alaskan students attended the Carlisle school, and 14 died and were buried in the school cemetery, according to records.

Three Alaska Native students have been returned home during the Carlisle repatriation efforts prior to this year. And at least one student, Ephraim Alexander, Yup’ik, died from tuberculosis while spending his final days with Moravian missionaries in Lititz, Pennsylvania, where he remains buried in a Moravian cemetery, according to the research of Lucy Rath while at Franklin and Marshall College.

One of his best friends, Henry Rose, who was at Alexander’s bedside when he died, lies in an unknown grave in the school cemetery.

Finding the families

Jacuk said the Office of Army Cemeteries reached out for help identifying students because they felt they’d “exhausted the documentation in the primary source material that’s useful in trying to return home these children buried at Carlisle.”

The Office of Army Cemeteries had initially refused to repatriate children unless descendants could be found, rejecting requests from tribes that their members be released to them under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA.

The dispute prompted a federal lawsuit in 2024 from the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, asking the court to order the government to honor the tribe’s request to return two boys who died at the school more than 100 years ago. A judge ruled in favor of the government and dismissed the case, but an appellate court in May 2026 overturned the lower court’s decision and ruled that NAGPRA regulations would apply to the repatriation of children.The ruling allows the Winnebago lawsuit to proceed against the government.

The Office of Army Cemeteries has declined to comment on whether it is honoring tribal authority to obtain repatriation of their children while the case is reconsidered. But the need to find a specific family member for each child had created additional pressure on Andrew.

“A big part in doing this research is not just looking at the places that everyone else has looked at, it’s making sure that we are looking at the places that they might not think to look at,” Jacuk said. “And so, that’s when we really went to looking at things like baptismal records, finding names and correspondence.”

Jacuk stressed the importance of being connected to communities to weed through inaccuracies in the school records and cemetery gravestones.

“We’re here to represent all peoples of Alaska,” he said. “And so, as a result, it becomes really easy to find connections very quickly within our communities. Because if someone doesn’t know what family to talk to … they know someone who can do that for us very easily.”