“Beheading and Robbing Native Graves” Interview with Lorene Sisquoc

Lorene Sisquoc (Fort Sill Apache/Cahuilla) is the Curator of Sherman Indian School Museum and the cultural instructor at Sherman Indian High Schools. She is an accomplished basket maker and a co-founder of the Mother Earth Clan, a non-profit organization created to preserve and protect Native American culture, history, language, and the arts.

Interview of Lorene Sisquoc

Siquoc offers details about “Beheading and Robbing Native Graves.” She stresses the theft and desecration of members of her family. American soldiers tortured and murdered her relative, Apache Chief Mangas Coloradas. Soldiers cut off his head and sent it to a museum. The museum has never repatriated the remains. On the Cahuilla side of her family, a group of white men dressed in black exhumed her great-grandmother’s body interred at the Soboba Reservation Cemetery and cut off her head after the one-year “doings” or anniversary ceremony to end the time of mourning.