Descendants tell government to return Geronimo’s remains

Twenty descendants of Geronimo filed a lawsuit against top U.S. government figures on Feb. 17, 100 years after Geronimo’s death. The suit, filed in federal court, demands that Geronimo’s remains and funerary objects be freed “from a century of wrongful confinement by the U.S. Army at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma” where they have been kept since he died of pneumonia at the hands of the U.S. military.

Geronimo bravely fought against the U.S. Army’s massacre of his people. His descendants are now seeking the return of his remains.

Geronimo, born Goyahklo in 1829, was a Bedonkohe Apache. He was a leader and fighter in the resistance movement against the U.S. Army in the late 19th century, and became a symbol of the Native American struggle. As the U.S. government continued its westward expansion in North America, its forces brutally massacred and stole lands from the Native Americans living there.

President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of the Army Pete Geren are named as defendants because Geronimo’s remains are under control of the U.S. government. Geronimo died while in the custody of the U.S. Army.

Yale University and the Order of Skull and Bones are also named as defendants. Yale is a private, mostly white bourgeois university in New Haven, Conn., with a history of oppression against working people, including opposition to unions and support for pervasive gentrification. Skull and Bones is a self-described secret society at Yale. Former Yale students, including Alexandra Robbins, author of the 2002 book “Secrets of the Tomb,” maintain that Geronimo’s skull was stolen by members of Skull and Bones in 1918 and is still kept in their “tomb.” Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, was supposedly among the thieves.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo said: “It’s been 100 years since 1909, since the death of my great grandfather. And you look at it, it’s been 100 years of imprisonment yet, not counting the time he was sent into imprisonment in Florida from 1886 to 1909. That was another 25 years there. It’s my belief … it’s a good cause because Indigenous over centuries have been annihilated, removed from their homelands.”

The descendants of Geronimo would re-inter his remains in the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico, closer to where he was born.

This case exemplifies the historic crimes committed against Native Americans by the U.S. government. The law unambiguously guarantees the descendants control over the remains. Continuing its tradition of trampling the rights of Indigenous peoples, the government has instead turned Geronimo’s remains into a tourist attraction. The struggle to right this wrong is a continuation of the struggle for Native American self-determination.