Nez Perce remains returned

SPALDING, Idaho – Two Nez Perce warriors were buried in northcentral Idaho on Friday and Saturday, more than a century after they died in the 1877 Battle of the Big Hole.

Since that battle, their remains have been stored at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

On Friday, a warrior whose name isn’t known was buried in the tiny Spalding Cemetery next to the Nez Perce National Historical Park.

A day later, the skull of Pahkatos Owyeen, or Five Wounds, was buried next to his son, William Jackson, at the tribal cemetery in Lapwai, two miles from Spalding near the Clearwater River.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 gave tribes the right to reclaim ancestral remains, sacred objects and other cultural treasures from federal museums and agencies. Horace Axtell, a Nez Perce elder and tribal spiritual leader, led a tribal delegation to Washington, D.C., last week to retrieve the remains.

“It’s very uncomfortable to all of us to have to go through these things,” Axtell said, according to the Lewiston Tribune. Still, “we have to do what the ancestors taught us to do, which is bring back the remains.”

In 1877, about 750 non-treaty Nez Perce – led by Chief Joseph – fled Idaho to avoid the U.S. Army’s demand that the tribe move onto a reservation that was a fraction of the size of the traditional Nez Perce homeland in Idaho and northeastern Oregon, according to the National Park Service.

The reservations were meant to contain the Indians – and free up most of their ancestral territory for white settlers.

The unknown Nez Perce warrior and Pahkatos Owyeen were among as many as 90 Indians who were killed Aug. 9, 1877, at a site near the Big Hole River in present-day Montana. Twenty-two soldiers, a civilian guide and five civilian volunteers also were killed, the Park Service said.