Two Native women heard spiritual appeals that eventually led them to Connecticut and my office. As the Connecticut State Archaeologist, a position I held for almost thirty years, I had the responsibility of supervising, in hopefully a professional and respectful manner, the archaeological removal and the forensic identification of the surviving skeletal remains of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Albert Afraid of Hawk, young men who died and were buried in our state in the 19th century. We worked with the Lee and Afraid of Hawk families and a team of funeral directors, forensic scientists, archaeologists, and historians to conduct the exhumations and prepare the remains for the final leg of their journeys home. Our involvement is the bridge between these Hawaiian and Lakota narratives.
Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia considered leaving the Big Island in the first decade of the 19th century “rather than live without a mother and father”1 who had been brutally slain before his childhood eyes by Kamehameha’s warriors. As a teenager, he secured passage onboard an American merchant ship, sailing halfway around the world hoping to replace pain and memory, attempting to outrun his survivor’s guilt, seeking peace from the violence he experienced in his youth with its resultant despondency. His journey would take him to Connecticut, where he was introduced to Christianity, experienced a St. Paul-type revelation accepting Jesus as his personal savior leading to his study of the Bible in hopes of returning home as a missionary to convert Native Hawaiians to the Gospel, but tragically dying of typhus fever in Cornwall, Connecticut, on Feb. 17, 1818, and buried under frozen New England earth. Considered the first Christianized Native Hawaiian, Henry’s journey stalled far from his birthplace until Debbie Lee, Henry’s cousin seven generations removed, heard in the still of the night his desire to come home and began the process for his return.
Eighty years later, at the close of the 19th century, Albert Afraid of Hawk, Oglala Lakota Sioux, first-generation reservation Indian born in the earliest days of the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, was also looking to leave his homeland. He set out with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe to escape the stifling colonization of the reservation system that forced him to share his childhood with starvation and ethnocide, forbidding him the fulfillment of his Lakota birthright. His grandfather rode with the undefeated Red Cloud and instilled the childhood Albert with stories of past Lakota glories and their harmony and balance with the universe before the coming of the waschius (white man); his father was beside Crazy Horse at Little Bighorn fighting against George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry; and his older brother travelled with Spotted Elk (aka Big Foot), surviving the massacre at Wounded Knee. Torn between two cultural worlds, he yearned to find identity, which on the reservation was being denied by a dominant, subjugating society. He wanted to be Lakota, free as his grandfather and father before him had been—warriors, buffalo hunters, men of honor—not enslaved as wards of the federal government. He left the reservation hoping to assume that life, even as a show performer. His journey would take him throughout the eastern seaboard and eventually to Danbury, Connecticut, where he died June 29, 1900, of food poisoning and was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Wooster Cemetery. His journey suspended far from his homeland until Marlis Afraid of Hawk, Albert’s grandniece, heard his yearning plea within a deep sleep and began the process of his return.
Teenagers when their journeys began, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Afraid of Hawk had heard separate callings to leave their homelands, crossing over to inhabit the world of the cultural other. Traditional ways of life had already broken down due to contact with Western society, disrupting their Indigenous cultural systems and leading to intense warfare, depopulation, environmental destruction, and ultimately loss of lands to the American government whose imperialist goals purposely undervalued both Hawaiian and Lakota cultures by prohibiting practices, such as ceremonies, dances, traditional dress, and the speaking of their ancient languages. More than 100 years after their untimely deaths, descendant women would hear their spiritual voices and seek to repatriate their ancestors’ remains, completing their long journeys home.
While the odysseys of these young Native men and the aspects of Manifest Destiny that crippled their Indigenous life ways are analogous in a remarkable fashion, they also represent distinct cultural traditions (Hawaiian and Lakota), differing time frames (Henry died fifty years before Albert was born) and legacies (Henry became celebrated while Albert remained relatively anonymous). Henry was buried under a stone monument, especially built to commemorate his memory forever; Albert was interred in an unmarked grave, its location unknown for 108 years. These two accounts were chosen for this book not only due to my personal involvement, but to highlight the disruptive commonalities of expansionism that led to massive deaths, conflicts, colonization, and conformity that continue to shape contemporary Hawaiian and Lakota communities and the resurgence of both cultures.
We know more about the life of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia due to the posthumous publishing of his chronicles by Rev. Edwin W. Dwight than we know of Albert Afraid of Hawk, who has no written autobiography. The Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, A Native of Owhyhee, and a Member of the Foreign Mission School, who died at Cornwall, Connecticut, February 17, 1818, aged 26 Years, contains a first-person account of his life in Hawai‘i, his private New England diary, letters from the Congregational community, and Dwight’s heart-rending description of Henry’s death. Even 19th century authors like Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London knew his story from Sunday school lessons. This book relies heavily on the Memoirs among other primary and secondary sources in relating ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s story and his impact on Hawaiian history.
Contrariwise, there are few primary documents referencing Albert Afraid of Hawk beyond U. S. Indian Census records, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West “Route Books,” and newspaper accounts of his death. The Lakota didn’t have a written language then, so only Euro-American records are available for us to reconstruct his life. After death, Albert, for the most part, had become anonymous, lost even to his family who never learned why he hadn’t returned home from his time with Buffalo Bill, and, except for photographs that Indian art collectors cherish in the Library of Congress, memory of him became obscured through time. As a result, we have taken more liberties with the telling of Albert’s story, reading between the lines and even going so far as to suggest motives for his leaving Pine Ridge. ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia had a profound effect on the Euro-American culture; Afraid of Hawk barely had the opportunity to penetrate it.
The physical remains of both men were archaeologically “resurrected” from their graves and welcomed home to great acclaim from long, arduous journeys. The parallels to their stories are striking. This book is an account of their lives, the histories of their people, and our experience repatriating their physical remains, an experience that has left me with a profound respect for the importance of family, heritage, and spirituality among Native communities in response to changes in the modern world and giving rise to my own personal journey as an archaeologist. In the spirit of Indigenous oral tradition, our approach in chronicling both long journeys home is through storytelling rather than scientific treatise. The danger of this approach is unintended romanticizing. The journeys they embarked upon were rites of passage, exhibiting universal elements of “separation, initiation, and return,”2 and, as a result, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Afraid of Hawk have inadvertently become champions who reappeared to bestow promise, cultural continuity, and pride to their people. They are links to a cultural past that has been modified greatly by the modern world system. Their stories are inspiring and have contemporary connotations. Our challenge has been to introduce Henry and Albert to the reader in pragmatic, unsentimental ways without losing the moving experiences of their personal tragedies and the inspiration they provide to their descendants. My intent is to memorialize and celebrate Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Albert Afraid