Lakota performer comes home after more than a century

Jacie Estes

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I had the honor and privilege to be friends with an Elder from this family, she is now passed. I am grateful to Creator, Wakan Tanka, that Albert Afraid of Hawk is now home on sacred ground. Pilamaya.

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It has taken 112 years, but Albert Afraid of Hawk is home.

Canned corn sickened the 20-year-old Oglala Lakota man while he traveled the east coast with the legendary Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. He died June 29, 1900, at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut.

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody arranged and paid for his burial three days later, near the pond at Wooster Cemetery in Danbury.

It has been a long wait and an epic journey, but Afraid of Hawk receives his proper Native burial today.

"It’s a historical event. It is really sacred to my family and the family of Pine Ridge," his great-niece, Marlis Afraid of Hawk, 54, of Dupree, said.


http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/la...cle_8291b9cb-7609-5353-a2bf-80eb91a5a522.html
 
Nicholas Bellantoni, the state archeologist for Connecticut, knew the coffin would have long disintegrated, and he prepared the family for the possibility that the acidic Connecticut soil had left little behind. Bellantoni and a team of excavators gently dug a couple of feet into the ground with a backhoe. At about 41/2 feet, they began getting hits on a metal detector, signaling they were getting closer to nails that had been in the coffin.

Then, once a piece of soil dislodged, bone began to poke out. It was Albert’s skull.

“I knew right there that Albert had been preserved, at least in part, and that they would be able to bring Albert home,” Bellantoni said.


http://www.nativetimes.com/life/people/7764-albert-afraid-of-hawk-reburied-at-sd-reservation
 
Thank you for posting this. What a holy thing, to finally return.
 
Albert Afraid of Hawk was born in 1879, the third son of Emil Afraid of Hawk and his wife, who was known as White Mountain. Alfred was born on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.

In about 1898, Albert became a member of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. Prior to departing with the show he was present at the American Indian Congress in Omaha, Nebraska, where all known photographs of Albert were taken.


http://www.afraidofhawk.org/Afraid_of_Hawk/Bio.html
 

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