The remains of an infant girl who was taken from a Thomas Bay cave nearly a century ago are coming home to Petersburg next month for burial.

Stephanie Aikins, who is coordinating the project for the Petersburg Indian Association, said the infant — known to those working on her return only as “Baby Girl” — will arrive on the northbound jet Sept. 4. A welcoming ceremony of singers and dancers is planned on the tarmac as she is unloaded.

“She will be back on her land for the first time in almost 100 years,” Aikins said.

The burial process, which will include remains of three individuals, was set into motion back when she first started working for PIA and learned about a skull that had been returned to the tribe.

The skull, according to Aikins and to community knowledge she gathered, was found in the 1950s during construction at the city reservoir. The city gave it to Petersburg High School, where it was stored until the 1990s, when a science teacher used it in anthropology and forensics units and it was repeatedly identified as a middle-age Native male.

Around 2013, Aikins said, the teacher gave the skull to PIA, where it was received by Will Ware and has remained since.

While searching through PIA’s archives for the skull, she came across a second ancestor: a partial mandible, or jawbone, which had been found in 1986 in front of a cabin south of Papke’s Landing and was determined to have belonged to a male at least 45 years old and thought to be prehistoric. The mandible was originally collected along with another bone, which was later determined to be a partial deer femur.

The third ancestor is Baby Girl. Aikins heard from a Petersburg resident that very old remains of an infant had been taken from Thomas Bay, so she searched newspaper archives and found a Jan. 11, 1996, article headlined “Museum offers to return native body found in 1928” — confirming the infant was held at the Burke Museum in Seattle.

When she reached the Burke Museum’s repatriation department, staff there were “ecstatic,” because returning the infant had been an ongoing effort of theirs for more than 20 years.

Much of the legal groundwork was already completed by the museum. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, remains and cultural items in museum collections are inventoried, claimed by a tribal entity and published for other tribes to review before repatriation proceeds. That part of the work was complete; Aikins said her role picks up with traveling to Seattle, retrieving the ancestor’s remains and bringing them home to be reinterred.

Federal records show in a January 2023 notice, the Burke Museum determined that human remains removed from Thomas Bay in Petersburg borough, along with six associated funerary objects, were culturally affiliated with the Petersburg Indian Association and could be repatriated.

According to museum records, the infant was found in 1928 by I.M. Dahl, then a druggist in Petersburg, in a cave at low tide in Thomas Bay. The remains were not collected by the Burke until 1930 — a two-year gap Aikins said she cannot yet account for. The infant was initially given to someone in Juneau, she said, and later came to the University of Washington, where the Burke Museum is located.

The Burke helped PIA apply for a NAGPRA grant and was awarded funding to help pay for the repatriation project.

Aikins and two committee members will fly to Seattle on Sept. 1 to hold ceremonies before bringing the infant home three days later.

A Seattle fine-art handling company, Artech, is building a custom crate to carry the infant north. Alaska Airlines has been “extremely helpful,” she said, allowing a pre-travel ceremony and coordinating the tarmac welcome.

Once home, Baby Girl will be held at the PIA offices alongside the other two ancestors until a larger ceremony and graveside service. Aikins said she is aiming for the end of September to mid-October — hoping to beat the rainy season. The borough is donating two plots and fees at the memorial cemetery on the hill, where the three will be reinterred.

There is no established protocol for what she is doing, Aikins said, because “people were not meant to be taken from their resting places.” Instead, she has leaned on elders, local historians and Tlingit clan protocol, consulting Will Ware and George Bennett of Sitka, and reaching out to Wrangell, which recently had clan objects returned. She described the work as “a spider web of a network of information.”

“We were pretty much told there is no protocol,” she said. “As long as you’re doing this out of a place of respect, you’ll be OK.”

She credited an active committee for its help and said the project has been a steady education. “The amount of information that I have taken in from this project is astonishing.”