Carlisle, Pennsylvania - The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska has filed a federal lawsuit seeking the return of remains of two children who died and were buried at a boarding school.

The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accuses the US Army's Office of Army Cemeteries (OAC) of violating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The law is designed to facilitate the preservation and return of human remains and sacred objects to Indigenous communities.

The Winnebago case revolves around the remains of Samuel Gilbert and Edward Hensley, who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

The federally run institution was among hundreds of notorious boarding schools that stole Indigenous children from their families and subjected them to systematic abuse and forced cultural erasure.

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Gilbert died 47 days after arriving at Carlisle, while Hensley died four years later. In total, 179 or more Indigenous children died and were buried at the school.

Carlisle closed in 1918 due to high death rates. Looking to expand its buildings, the Army then dug up the Indigenous children's remains and reburied them – once again without notifying families and tribes.

On October 16, the Winnebago Tribe submitted a repatriation request for Gilbert and Hensley's remains, currently buried at Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery.

The Army denied the request in a letter dated December 7.

The Winnebago Tribe is now accusing the OAC of imposing its own Disinterment and Return Process, which requires a "closest living relative" to initiate a claim to human remains, in violation of federal law.

Winnebago legal representatives have pointed out that many victims of boarding schools were children and died without any direct descendants. On top of that, NAGPRA provides a process for sovereign tribal nations to request the repatriation of remains.

"By refusing to repatriate Samuel and Edward to Winnebago pursuant to NAGPRA, Defendants violated federal law, unlawfully denied Winnebago its right to have Samuel and Edward repatriated, and undermined Congress's objectives in enacting NAGPRA in 1990," the lawsuit states.

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The plaintiffs go on to accuse the Army and OAC of mishandling the remains and using them for research, display, and tourism purposes.

"Particularly egregious, Defendants use the holding or collection for these purposes to serve their institutional goals: to tell their own version of Carlisle's history and to distance themselves from and absolve themselves of responsibility for their role in tragic aspects of that history," they state in the lawsuit.

"Today, Winnebago continues to experience the pain of knowing that Samuel's and Edward's spirits remain lost and unable to rest as they have been waiting to come home for nearly 125 years."