It was an ordinary announcement, delivered in the matter-of-fact tone of a pilot who had made the journey many times before. But for one passenger, Harold Richards, it was more than routine. The landscape beyond the window was familiar, yet the realization that he was about to arrive at Holy Cross lent the journey significance beyond geography or family history. He was leaving behind the relative anonymity of Anchorage for the quiet, isolated rhythm of a river village where the past was not always past, and where the reason for this journey had waited for more than a century.<\/p>\n
As Holy Cross drew nearer, the journey\u2019s weight settled over him. Thoughts and images surfaced and receded, too many and too tangled to hold for long. Then his thoughts returned to his great-grandfather, Little Doctor, a Holy Cross medicine man.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/michaelgkarnavas.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/IMG_3901.heic?w=840&ssl=1\")
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Little Doctor, a Deg Hit\u2019an<\/a> Athabascan<\/a>, died in 1900 during what became known as the \u201cgreat sickness<\/a>\u201d or \u201cgreat death,\u201d an epidemic that swept through the Yukon and other parts of Alaska. In some areas, it killed a quarter to half of the Native population and forced the abandonment of villages. Little Doctor was buried in his village. Years later, his grave was opened, and his remains were taken from Alaska to Washington, D.C., for measurements and anthropological scrutiny by Ale\u0161 Hrdli\u010dka<\/a>, the anthropologist and curator of the physical anthropology collections at the Smithsonian Institution<\/a>. His remains became part of the Smithsonian\u2019s collection, alongside those of people from Holy Cross, other Alaska Native communities, and Indigenous communities across the United States. His story belongs to a much larger history in which Native Americans were removed from their graves, studied, and held in institutions far from their communities.<\/p>\n Now, at last, Little Doctor and his fellow villagers, relatives, friends, and neighbors were coming home to be laid to rest once more.<\/p>\n Harold is Little Doctor\u2019s great-grandson and the eldest male among his siblings. Over time, he has become the de facto patriarch of his extended family. He and his lifelong partner, Nora Elliott, had worked for years to bring Little Doctor and the others from Holy Cross home. Yet Harold could not quite explain why the burden of Little Doctor\u2019s long odyssey, from burial in his ancestral homeland to removal, storage, identification, and eventual return, seemed to rest particularly heavily on him. The work had been long and taxing, demanding patience, persistence, and an emotional investment that was difficult to convey to anyone who had not lived through it.<\/p>\n And it had begun, improbably enough, with a single sentence in a text written nearly a century earlier.<\/p>\n Nora knew the family history. Without that knowledge, Hrdli\u010dka\u2019s brief entry might have gone unnoticed. Instead, it gave her a clue worth pursuing.<\/p>\n To explain how that entry led to the search, I need to step back and tell the story as it was told to me.<\/p>\n Nora and I have been friends for nearly forty years. Whenever I return to Anchorage, my old stomping grounds from my days as a federal and state public defender, we make a point to see each other. Those years shaped me as a lawyer and gave me the chance to travel throughout Alaska, where I came to appreciate the richness and diversity of its Native peoples, their distinct histories, languages, and traditions. Through Nora, I met Harold, and through both of them, I came to know something of Holy Cross.<\/p>\n A few years ago, Nora told me about a discovery she and Harold had made nearly two decades earlier: Little Doctor\u2019s remains might not be where his family had believed them to be, but might instead be thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C. I was intrigued. In the years that followed, I learned how they confirmed his whereabouts and followed their efforts to bring him home. As the search unfolded, the remains of others from Holy Cross were also identified.<\/p>\n Only on this trip, as I write from Anchorage, did I learn that the Smithsonian had transported the remains north, that a chartered flight had been arranged, and that preparations were underway to bring Little Doctor and the others home to Holy Cross, where they could finally be laid to rest among their own people.<\/p>\n There is more to this story than Little Doctor and the circumstances surrounding his removal. It concerns people, institutions, and history; consequences that outlast the acts that set them in motion. Little Doctor\u2019s homecoming brings those larger questions into view: how Indigenous people were treated in life and in death, how institutions justified taking possession of their ancestors, and how the consequences of those practices continue long after the original acts. What follows is Harold\u2019s and Nora\u2019s account, set alongside the documents that help establish what happened.<\/p>\n The Place<\/strong><\/p>\n The village\u2019s character began to change in the 1880s, when Father Aloysius Robaut<\/a>, having crossed the Chilkoot Trail into Alaska, established a Catholic mission and school. Athabascans from the surrounding region moved to the village to be near the mission, which became an increasingly important part of community life. In 1899, a post office opened under the name \u201cKoserefsky.\u201d<\/p>\n But the changes brought by outsiders came at a terrible cost. In 1900, influenza and measles swept through Holy Cross and the surrounding villages, carried by white travelers. These illnesses were familiar elsewhere, but the people of the Yukon had little or no acquired immunity. The toll was devastating, and Holy Cross was nearly wiped out. Many of those who survived had been away at their fishing camps when the epidemics struck, unaware of the deaths at home. They had been spared the initial outbreak because they were away, and they returned to a community transformed by loss.<\/p>\n In 1912, the village adopted the name Holy Cross, after the mission, the fourth name it had appeared under in the records. Its isolation remained a defining feature of life there. For decades, sternwheelers traveling the Yukon brought mail and supplies only two or three times a year, offering a tenuous link to the outside world. The river itself continued to shape the settlement: changes in its course during the 1930s gradually formed the slough along which the community now stands. When the mission\u2019s boarding school closed in 1956, the church and many other mission buildings were dismantled, marking the end of an era. Holy Cross nevertheless endured, and in 1968 the community incorporated as a city.<\/p>\n The Entry<\/strong><\/p>\n Nora’s discovery was a sentence that belongs to Hrdli\u010dka, the Smithsonian curator who removed Little Doctor from his grave.<\/p>\n Hrdli\u010dka was not a disinterested collector. He was also an enthusiast of eugenics<\/a> and used human remains in research on supposed differences among human populations. From the record I have seen (admittedly, I have not done a deep dive), it is difficult to determine how far his theories shaped his research from the outset. That question matters for assessing his work, but the point here is more immediate: what he did to Little Doctor and others whose graves he excavated.<\/p>\n In Alaska Diary, 1926-1931<\/em><\/a>, Hrdli\u010dka describes expeditions in which he located burial sites, excavated graves, and collected skeletons for scientific study. As a curator at the Smithsonian, he had institutional support for this work and the means to transport and preserve the remains he collected. His diary suggests that he sometimes took care to remove remains without disturbing the surrounding grave. But careful excavation is not the same as respect for the dead or for the people to whom they belonged. The record does not indicate that obtaining permission from families or communities, or ensuring that their burial customs were respected, was a priority.<\/p>\n In Holy Cross, the distinction between those who had converted to Catholicism and those who had not appears to have shaped burial locations. Catholics were interred in the Catholic cemetery; those who had not been baptized were buried separately, farther away, on the outskirts of the village. When Hrdli\u010dka came looking for graves to excavate, the Catholic priest would not permit him to disturb the graves in the Catholic cemetery. The remains of the baptized were thus protected from his collecting, while those buried outside the cemetery were more exposed to it. Hrdli\u010dka was able to collect from the latter burial ground without any recorded resistance. That silence tells us little about what the families might have thought, whether they knew what was happening, or whether they had any meaningful opportunity to object.<\/p>\n On July 21, 1929, Hrdli\u010dka recorded the events of that day in Holy Cross:<\/p>\n \u201cAfter breakfast see two sites, unnamed and undistinguishable, five miles above Holy Cross; the other side of little \u2018St. Michael\u2019s Slough.\u2019 On return stop at the upper hill of the Ghost Creek basin, where Walker and M saw some burials last night. Find in all six, carefully collect skeletons. The most recent is a fullblood big-chested medicine man, who died of the flu in 1900.<\/strong><\/span> All from white man\u2019s period, but all good. A lot of hard work, but getting expert. All heads of the buried point up the river or towards it. All above ground, in put-to (not nailed) \u2018Boxes,\u2019 and in contracted position, only medicine man extended. Had a little cross with him, also a thin filubla-like stick, nothing else. Took bones out from the side and very carefully, not to disturb the grave. Maybe no one of his own left and no one cares, but it helps much myself to keep the work on as high a niveau as possible. (Alaska Diary, pp. 220\u201321; emphasis added.)<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote><\/p>\n That one sentence caught Nora\u2019s attention: \u201cThe most recent is a fullblood big-chested medicine man, who died of the flu in 1900.\u201d<\/p>\n The Search<\/strong><\/p>\n At the time, Nora had taken up genealogy as a hobby, tracing the roots and histories of her own family. She decided to do the same for Harold\u2019s clan in Holy Cross, the family into which he was born. One day, while sitting at the kitchen table poring over historical records, she came across Hrdli\u010dka\u2019s account. From her research and conversations with family members and elders in Holy Cross, she knew that Little Doctor had been the medicine man of the community, the Medecin Man<\/em>, as he was known, a healer and spiritual figure whose role extended beyond what either \u201cmedicine man\u201d or \u201cshaman\u201d can convey. The entry made her pause and consider a troubling possibility: could the medicine man Hrdli\u010dka described have been Harold\u2019s great-grandfather, known as Little Doctor?<\/p>\n If it was him, how had his remains ended up in the Smithsonian? Had he not been buried in Holy Cross after dying in the 1900 epidemic? Through an elderly aunt, Harold and Nora learned that Little Doctor, as a practicing medicine man, had never converted to Catholicism or been baptized. Under church doctrine, he would not have been considered eligible for a Christian burial, unlike his wife and children, who had converted and, in return, received a stipend of flour and other staples. Given the prevailing Catholic burial practices of the era, Little Doctor was laid to rest apart from the consecrated cemetery, up the hill on the outskirts of the village. That account offered a plausible explanation for why his grave might have been outside the Catholic cemetery, though the precise location of his original burial may never be established. How, then, had his remains traveled thousands of miles from that remote burial ground to become part of a museum collection?<\/p>\n The clues were there, but clues alone were not enough. Harold and Nora had to follow the records, pursue the leads, and establish what had happened. They spoke with aging relatives and village elders, pored over archives, consulted experts, and visited the Smithsonian to learn firsthand whether Little Doctor\u2019s remains were indeed kept there, and, if so, in what condition and how he might be repatriated.<\/p>\n Eventually, they confirmed that Little Doctor\u2019s remains had been exhumed around 1929 and taken for research shaped by the period\u2019s racial science. Through their persistence, aided by a few serendipitous turns, they discovered something more: the Smithsonian also held other remains Hrdli\u010dka had unearthed from Holy Cross for his research.<\/p>\n Hrdli\u010dka\u2019s work was shaped by the deeply flawed assumptions of early physical anthropology, which sought to measure and classify human bodies to categorize populations. A central focus of his research was tracing the migrations of human groups, notably advancing the theory that Indigenous peoples of the Americas descended from populations arriving from Asia. While this position diverged from theories positing separate origins for different human groups, it did not place him outside the prevailing racial thinking of his era. His methods and collections remained anchored in a discipline that treated race as a biological reality, using skull and bone measurements to map human variation. In practice, his excavations turned human remains into data points for an institutional effort to catalog Indigenous groups, including Alaska Natives and Athabascans of the Yukon, under the banner of scientific inquiry. Whatever the stated academic purpose, the people whose remains he collected were reduced to objects of study, severed from their communities and ancestral resting places.<\/p>\n There is not space here to recount every step in recovering Little Doctor\u2019s history and securing the return of his remains. It was a long and arduous journey: first, reconstructing events nearly a century old; then, undertaking the work necessary to bring him home. Little Doctor was not alone. The remains of many other Alaska Native people had been removed from their graves \u2013 often without their families\u2019 knowledge or consent \u2013 and transported to distant institutions far from their communities. For tribes and families seeking their ancestors\u2019 return, the process has proved complicated and costly, both emotionally and financially.<\/p>\n Little Doctor\u2019s story is part of a broader history of dispossession, coercion, cultural suppression, and betrayal experienced by Indigenous peoples across Alaska, the United States, and Canada. The details vary from place to place, but what happened to him was not an aberration. Telling his story without that context would leave too much unexplained.<\/p>\n The Long Shadow<\/strong><\/p>\n To understand how such things could happen, it helps to begin with an idea Europeans carried long before they reached Alaska: that they were entitled to rule over peoples they considered inferior, and that their religion gave them particular authority to do so. One formal expression of that idea was the Papal Bull <\/a>Inter Caetera<\/em><\/a>, issued by Pope Alexander VI<\/a> on 4 May 1493, in the aftermath of Columbus\u2019s voyages. Directed principally at the Spanish Crown, it purported to grant Spain rights over lands not already under the rule of a Christian sovereign, while charging the Crown with spreading Christianity among the peoples living there. It became part of what is known as the Doctrine of Discovery<\/em><\/a>, a framework through which European powers sought to legitimize their claims to lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. It was not the beginning of European exploitation, nor the sole source of the ideas that sustained it, but it gave religious sanction to a consequential proposition: that the claims of Christian rulers could take precedence over the rights of non-Christian peoples to their own lands. The inhabitants were not consulted.<\/p>\n There is no direct connection between Inter caetera<\/em> and what later unfolded in Alaska. The missionaries who worked there did not need to know of a papal decree issued for the Spanish Crown centuries earlier, or of the dispossession it helped sanction in the Americas. The connection is subtler. Once the idea took hold that Christian civilization conferred a superior claim to land and authority, it could outlive the decree that helped articulate it. It was carried forward, adapted, and reinforced by governments, churches, settlers, and institutions with their own reasons for wanting to remake Indigenous peoples in the image of the newcomers. The language and justifications shifted over time, but the underlying presumption \u2013 that outsiders knew better than Indigenous peoples what was good for them \u2013 proved remarkably durable.<\/p>\n In the United States, that presumption found one of its starkest expressions in the campaign to assimilate Native Americans by separating them from their communities and suppressing the practices that defined their identities. In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt<\/a>, an officer in the US Army and founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School<\/a> in Pennsylvania, gave memorable expression to the philosophy behind this campaign: \u201cKill the Indian in him, and save the man.\u201d<\/a> The words were not a call for literal murder. They expressed something that, in its own way, was no less revealing: the belief that Native children could be saved, educated, or civilized only by stripping away the identities they had inherited.<\/p>\n Alaska was not insulated from these ideas. As Christian denominations established missions across the territory, conversion and schooling became powerful instruments of cultural change. The missionaries were not all alike, and some undoubtedly believed they were offering spiritual guidance, education, and material assistance. But benevolent intentions do not erase the consequences of policies that demanded cultural submission as the price of acceptance. Historical context helps explain their conduct, but it does not excuse everything they did or require us to accept their own account of it. We can acknowledge that many believed they were acting for the good of those they sought to convert, while still asking what gave them the authority to decide that other peoples\u2019 identities had to be destroyed for their own good.<\/p>\n The consequences extended far beyond a change in religious belief. When children were separated from their families and sent to boarding schools<\/a>, punished for speaking their own languages, and taught to regard their traditions and spiritual practices as inferior, the damage reached into the fabric of entire communities. For many children, boarding school meant being told that the language they brought with them had no place in the classroom or, in some schools, even in conversation among pupils. These were not simply schools where children learned English; they were institutions that treated Native languages and traditions as obstacles to overcome. This system was not confined to Alaska. Across the United States, Native children were sent to boarding schools under an assimilationist policy that sought to separate them from the cultures in which they had been raised.<\/p>\n This is why the term cultural genocide<\/em><\/a> enters the discussion, though it requires care. The deliberate destruction of a people\u2019s culture is not, by itself, the crime of genocide as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention<\/a>. The Convention requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through one or more enumerated acts.<\/p>\n Yet the distinction between physical destruction and the destruction of a people\u2019s cultural identity should not be mistaken for a distinction between grave harm and something less consequential. The forcible transfer of children, for example, is expressly included among the acts capable of constituting genocide when the Convention\u2019s other requirements are met. The resulting loss of language, tradition, and the ability to transmit a shared identity across generations is profound.<\/p>\n When such losses stem from deliberate policies intended to dismantle a group\u2019s identity, the question cannot be settled merely by labeling the conduct cultural genocide. Given the (ab)use<\/a> of the term genocide in public discourse, it is important to distinguish the gravity of the conduct from its legal characterization. Whether the Convention\u2019s high legal threshold has been met requires consideration of the acts as a whole, the specific intent behind them, and their consequences. That determination must rest on the evidence and the applicable legal standard, however compelling the initial impression may be.<\/p>\n The underlying objective was not merely to assimilate Native peoples into the dominant society but to denativize<\/em> them \u2013 to borrow an ugly word for an ugly aim: to alienate distinct peoples from their languages, cultures, religious practices, ways of life, and traditions, and to remake them in the image of a supposedly purer, more advanced, and more \u201ccivilized\u201d culture. The ambition was to eradicate Native identity while preserving the individual, in the spirit of the notorious injunction to \u201ckill the Indian in him, and save the man.\u201d Such a project sought to destroy, from within, what made these peoples distinct. Even where it was not fully realized, the deliberate and systematic pursuit of that objective arguably goes beyond what the term cultural genocide alone conveys. It raises the further question of whether the conduct, considered in its totality and in light of the requisite intent, could satisfy the legal elements of attempted genocide under the Convention, not merely constitute cultural destruction.<\/p>\n That question should be approached with the same care as any other serious allegation under the Convention. The existence of a policy designed to suppress or eradicate cultural identity does not, by itself, establish genocide. The analysis requires close attention to the acts committed, the intent they evidence \u2013 especially whether special genocidal intent, or dolus specialis<\/em>, is present \u2013 and the strict legal requirements under the applicable law. But neither should the legal distinction close off the inquiry. Because genocide is defined by specific elements, the evidence, the purpose behind the conduct, and the relationship between individual acts and the broader policy must be examined rather than assumed.<\/p>\n The connection between these policies and the removal of Indigenous remains is not that they were necessarily parts of one coordinated plan, but that they could draw upon a shared hierarchy of authority. The same cultural and religious assumptions that cast Indigenous peoples as subjects for conversion and assimilation could also make their remains available for scientific collection and display. When a person\u2019s traditions were dismissed as transient or primitive, that person remained vulnerable, even in death, to being categorized as a specimen rather than mourned as an ancestor. While the vocabulary of science offered a different veneer than the language of faith, both operated within hierarchies grounded in the belief that those who classified held superior authority over those who were classified. Acknowledging this history does not erase individual nuance, nor does it paint every missionary, official, or scientist with a single brush. But we must not let the past\u2019s nuance blind us to the weight of its pattern.<\/p>\n The Smithsonian<\/strong><\/p>\n To its credit, the Smithsonian cooperated throughout the process and was especially helpful at key stages. A great deal of credit goes to Dr. Dorothy Lippert<\/a>, the Smithsonian\u2019s Repatriation Program<\/a> Manager, who shepherded Little Doctor\u2019s return. The process began in 2003, when Harold and Nora met with her as the Case Officer. That cooperation deserves acknowledgment. However, it does not erase the original wrong or diminish the harm caused when Indigenous people were treated as objects of study and their remains were separated from their families, communities, and traditional resting places. The Smithsonian\u2019s history of holding Native American remains raises weighty questions about who has authority over the dead, what obligations institutions owe the families and communities to whom those ancestors belong, and how such wrongs can be addressed.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/michaelgkarnavas.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Skulls.png?resize=462%2C231&ssl=1\")
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First, a word about where this happened. Holy Cross is a small, remote community in Interior Alaska, on the west bank of Ghost Creek Slough, off the Yukon River, about 40 miles northwest of Aniak and 420 miles southwest of Fairbanks. Long before it acquired its present name, the settlement was home to a sizable Indigenous community. In the early 1840s, a Russian expedition led by the naval officer, scientist, and explorer Lavrenty_Zagoskin<\/a> recorded it as \u201cAnilukhtakpak,\u201d with a population of about 170. By 1880, it appeared in the records as \u201cAskhomute,\u201d with about thirty residents. The reason for this decline is uncertain. The smallpox epidemic<\/a> of 1835\u20131840, which killed many people along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, likely contributed, as may have forced migration and the consolidation of villages (see generally<\/em> here<\/a>).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/michaelgkarnavas.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/SiouxBoys.png?resize=461%2C323&ssl=1\")
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