Healing, joy and new connections filled a Ketchikan family’s journey in September to the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the family’s ancestor, Mabel Stack, died in 1904 as a young girl attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Six of Mabel’s descendants, including four Ketchikan residents, visited Carlisle on Sept. 23-30 for the purpose of bringing her remains home. During their visit, U.S. Army officials discovered the remains beneath Mabel’s headstone belonged not to Mabel, but to a young man.

Two of Mabel’s descendants said in an interview with the Ketchikan Daily News on Oct. 15 they are honored to be connected with the unidentified young man, and confident that Mabel’s remains will be returned home soon.

Mabel, born in Metlakatla in 1893 and raised in Loring, is the aunt of Sheepinsh Goah Marilyn Stack, who was born in Ketchikan in 1945 and now lives in Saxman.

Marilyn worked with Office of Army Cemeteries officials for about a year to coordinate Mabel’s disinterment. Marilyn could not travel to Carlisle this fall, so she appointed her second cousin Ahl’lidaaw Gitnack’angeak to represent her on the trip.

Marilyn’s son Richard Stack, and nieces Rosanna Angus and Marguerite Watts, also traveled there from Ketchikan; and her cousins Kathleen McKidis and Holly Brogue traveled there from Florida.

Marilyn said the effort brought her family closer.

“We’re full of joy, for everything,” Marilyn said. “There’s lots of heartache, there always is. That’s how life is. … But it’s a lot of joy that has come out of this, between my family members.”

The Stack family members traveled to Carlisle along with three Alaska families whose ancestors — Lucy Spaulding of Metlakatla and Tummassak and Edward Angalook of the Bering Strait region — all died of tuberculosis while attending Carlisle as children. 

Ahl’lidaaw said that, while spending time together, the Alaska families found they share common ancestors and other connections.

Although the Stack family was not able to return to Ketchikan with Mabel’s remains, “the way we see it is our family has only grown,” Ahl’lidaaw said. “We went down on faith and love, and we came back on faith and love."

Reflecting on her initial arrival at Carlisle, Ahl’lidaaw said, “I had a chip on my shoulder because my heart really went out to the innocent children in the cemetery. … They had had a hard life at Carlisle and they passed away and weren’t able to go home.”

She spoke to the legacy of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which operated from 1879 to 1918 as the first federally-funded boarding school for Native American children. The school removed children from their families, cultures and languages. More than 10,000 Native students attended the school.

While visiting the former Carlisle campus, the Alaska families learned about ongoing research into student deaths, forced labor and the school’s low graduation rate. They also saw a stone building constructed by students that was used to confine children as punishment, Ahl’lidaaw said.

School records indicate that more than 230 Native students died while enrolled at Carlisle. Since 2017, the Office of Army Cemeteries has conducted annual disinterment programs that, through 2025, had returned 58 children from the Carlisle cemetery to their home communities.

“From the beginning, I did recognize how frightening this whole idea was, that our children were taken,” Ahl’lidaaw said. She said that she believes it’s heroic that families of children who died at Carlisle decide to move forward with disinterments for their ancestors.

Ahl’lidaaw said she felt a strong spiritual presence at the cemetery, which was separated from the passing traffic of an adjacent freeway by a black cloth barrier.

“I could feel that that was truly hallowed ground,” she said. “The air was light on that ground. … That really told me that there were really strong, good spirits around. … It made me feel very, very encouraged.”

The disinterment took place on Sept. 25, the first day that the Alaska families visited the cemetery. Prior to the disinterment, Ahl’lidaaw gave a traditional Tsimshian land acknowledgement for the Susquehannock people who are Indigenous to the lands where Carlisle exists today.

“I apologized for the things that had happened on their land over the years and said that we’re there because we came to bring our relatives home, and we asked permission to walk on their land,” Ahl’lidaaw said.

Army officials prepared tools needed for the disinterment, set up a waiting area in a tent near the graveyard, and placed chairs beside the headstones, beneath an awning, for the family members.

“It was very surreal, and we were in disbelief,” Ahl’lidaaw said. “We couldn’t believe that this was all happening so fast.”

She said the Army officials, many of whom work year-round at the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., took extreme care with the disinterment.

“Even the laborers who were about ready to put the shovels on the side of the turf to cut the grass … you would have thought it was an eagle feather or dynamite, they were handling the turf so carefully,” Ahl’lidaaw said.

Ahl’lidaaw said she and her relatives sat about 30 feet from Mabel’s grave site as archaeologists with paint brushes and sticks worked to carefully uncover the casket and remove pieces of a student’s remains.

“At every phase, it became more gruesome,” Ahl’lidaaw said, of the process of uncovering, opening and emptying the casket. “It was more gruesome when we started recognizing the bones.”

“I felt obligated to witness it,” Ahl’lidaaw said. “While I was waiting for our Mabel, then we saw a big, long femur of the thigh bone. … As it turns out, it wasn’t hers.”

Some days after the disinterment, a team of forensic anthropologists confirmed to the Stack family members that the remains belong to a 19-year-old boy.

“You could tell (the forensic experts) were really on a mission to discover what was going on, and they were very broken-hearted,” Ahl’lidaaw said. She said the experts found evidence that the 19-year-old boy experienced malnourishment.

When the anthropologists shared the news, “it was Roseanna, Marguerite and Richard, all three in unison, said, ‘We’re adopting him! He’s our family now,’” Ahl’lidaaw said.

“Then I knew what I had come for,” Ahl’lidaaw said, noting that she and Marilyn had already agreed that, in the case they found remains of another student, they would celebrate and honor them as their own.

“I had a suitcase on one of the tables full of the things that I had intended for Mabel, for her casket, so I told them, ‘We proceed with the same ceremony as if it was Mabel.’”

Ahl’lidaaw described how she gave Army officials careful instructions on how to handle the young man’s remains, sang Tsimshian songs and completed traditional cultural protocols as officials prepared to return his remains to the ground.

“Now we know him, and we can take a lot of peace,” Ahl’lidaaw said of the young man. “In his casket, he is wrapped in a red cloth that had killer whales on it, and there’s eagle down covering him, and eagle feathers and a copper shield and the hemlock sprigs for the people of the hemlock, our tribe. … He is spoken for and he is loved until his family is located.”

Ahl’lidaaw said she learned during the visit that some 20 families who have visited Carlisle did not find their relatives beneath their respective headstone. “There’s a finite number of people that haven’t been matched yet.”

They still hold out hope of finding Mabel’s remains.

“When they disinter somebody who has the bones of an 11-year-old girl, they know they have found Mabel, and they’re going to give a call, and they’re going to say, ‘We’re sending for you,’” she said.

Ahl’lidaaw said four more Alaska families have disinterments scheduled for their ancestors’ grave sites at Carlisle in the fall of 2027.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” Ahl’lidaaw said. “For all tribes in the U.S. and even families in Canada, this is the very beginning of Indian country bringing their relatives home.”

She reflected on the legacy of Carlisle and other institutions that removed Native children from their families as “a hurt that was done long ago.”

“We’re trying to work toward repairing things now, and this is the beginning of that,” Ahl’lidaaw said.