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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Geronimo's descendants sue Skull and Bones -- and the U.S. Army Three years after the Yale Alumni Magazine revealed new evidence that Skull and Bones may have robbed Geronimo's grave, his great-grandson is suing for return of the relics. But Skull and Bones is only one of the defendants. A lawyer for Harlyn Geronimo says he doesn't know whether any of the Apache warrior's remains are in New Haven, and that Yale and its most notorious secret society are not the main focus of the suit. Of the "twenty-nine-page complaint, [PDF] Skull and Bones is only one paragraph," says the lawyer, Ramsey Clark, in a telephone interview. "The main entity is the U.S. Army," owner of Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Geronimo was held as a prisoner of war and buried after his death in 1909. In 2006, the Yale Alumni Magazine printed a newly unearthed 1918 letter [PDF] from one Skull and Bones member to another. It stated: "The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill . . . is now safe inside the T-- together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn." The abbreviation "T--" refers to the society's "Tomb," its mausoleum-like clubhouse. (The letter was discovered by writer Marc Wortman during research for his book about World War I Yale aviators, The Millionaires' Unit.) Some experts believe that Skull and Bones desecrated the wrong grave by mistake, and the skull they thought was Geronimo's probably belonged to a different Native American. But there seems little question that most of the Indian leader's remains are still buried at Fort Sill. Perhaps surprisingly, Harlyn Geronimo's aim is not to return any missing relics to Oklahoma, but rather to move all of his great-grandfather's remains to his New Mexico homeland. In its own words, the federal suit seeks "to free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit from one hundred years of imprisonment at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut, and wherever else they may be found," and to return them "to his native land, at the headwaters of the Gila River among the surrounding mountains." Clark contends that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gives Harlyn Geronimo and nineteen other blood relatives "the right to ownership, control, and possession" of Geronimo's remains. The first named defendant is President Barack Obama, followed by the secretaries of defense and the army. Yale and the Order of Skull and Bones finish out the list. No one has emerged from the Tomb to comment on the lawsuit. A university spokeswoman pointed out that Skull and Bones is legally independent of Yale. Asked how confident he is that Skull and Bones actually has
Geronimo's skull or other relics, Clark replies simply: "We don't know. There's
been enough commentary about it over enough time that you can't ignore it. If
we're serious about getting control of all the remains, we had to sue them.
It's nothing personal." |
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Related The story behind the Geronimo lawsuit: Ramsey Clark, Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and the Apache
Did Skull and Bones rob the grave of Geronimo during World War I?
Judith Ann Schiff's "Old Yale" column on the origins of Yale's secret societies. |
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