The first clue was a name.
Two years ago, the U.S. Army was working to identify Native people buried at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Among the records was a Shoshone girl from Nevada: Della Atkins. But her name had been misspelled, and there was little information about her, so the Army contacted Shoshone tribes across Northern Nevada.
Eventually, the search reached the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation.
“They reached out to every Northern Nevada tribe that is Shoshone and eventually came down to our tribe,” said Marco Ovando, Della’s great-great nephew.
Relatives began searching through old census records and comparing family lines.
That’s how they made the connection.
“Looking through the census records. We found her and our grandfather to be siblings,” said elder Elena Atkins, a matriarch of the Atkins family and a relative of Della.
Della was their relative, yet she had been missing from their family history for generations.
“We were able to pinpoint that Della was a part of our family and that she was from Duck Valley,” Ovando said.
The family has found only a few details about Della’s life before Carlisle.
“We did find out that she worked as a baker or a cook at a place in Winnemucca, Nevada, shortly before she left, and apparently she was already sick when she left and arrived in Carlisle,” said Elena Atkins.
Della was 17 when she arrived at Carlisle on Dec. 12, 1900. She died 13 days later.
The family learned she had been seriously ill. Research into her remains found evidence of an advanced brain tumor. The family doesn’t know whether they were ever told she had died.
But her family knew one thing: Della needed to come home.
“She was too far away. We need to bring her back,” said Elena Atkins.
The family traveled more than 2,000 miles to Pennsylvania.
Della’s remains were transported back to Duck Valley with the U.S. Army, where tribal members welcomed her home with song, prayer and ceremony.
For Ovando, the emotional weight of the moment was difficult to describe.
“Overall, it was a feeling of peace and family togetherness... once everything came together, it came together in what we call a good way,” Ovando said.
Della’s return is part of confronting the harm caused by the boarding school era, said Daphne Emm Hooper, director of Indigenous Relations at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“There's a lot of emotion, and there's a lot of historical trauma... so this is a start of the healing process and the discussion about the reality of what has happened and what we need to do to move things forward,” she said.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated until 1918. More than 7,800 Native children attended. About 200 died and were buried in the school’s cemetery, according to the National Park Service. The U.S. Army continues to work with federally recognized tribes to return children buried at the Carlisle cemetery. Since 2017, 58 have been returned.
Bringing Della home means the family can finally care for her as they do with their other ancestors, said elder and matriarch Charlotte Atkins.
“But she's home now, and that's the most important thing,” Charlotte Atkins said.
And for the family, she won’t disappear from their history again.
“She'll become a part of that. She'll no longer be lost,” Charlotte Atkins said.
