Geronimo Descendant Pursues Spirited Fight

Geronimo Descendant Pursues Spirited Fight

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; Page C01

Geronimo, the great Apache warrior, is not resting in peace.

In the sort of news conference that most likely could happen only in Washington, Geronimo's great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, announced a lawsuit against the U.S. government yesterday to recover his famous ancestor's remains -- a strange last spasm in the Indian wars, with roles assigned to President Obama, Buffalo Bill, Willa Cather, the family of George W. Bush, and former attorney general Ramsey Clark, now 81 and long a lawyer for the sort of esoteric causes that generate news conferences, however sparsely attended.

For this news conference, at the National Press Club, Geronimo projected a sort of authenticity by wearing a Vietnam Veterans ball cap, Apache medicine beads, Ray-Ban tinted glasses, a bullfighter's belt buckle and black boots. Clark, in a corduroy jacket and thin striped tie, might have found a more sympathetic client in Geronimo -- lately he has advocated on behalf of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, Lyndon LaRouche and the government of North Korea.

It was the 100th anniversary of Geronimo's death from pneumonia, at 79, while a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla.

"If remains are not properly buried, the spirit is just wandering, wandering, until a proper burial has been performed," the 61-year-old great-grandson said, speaking slowly, emotionally. After two tours in Vietnam he became a sculptor and an actor. "The only way to bring this to a closure is to release the remains and his spirit, so that he can be taken back to his homeland."
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Clark filed Geronimo's lawsuit in U.S. District Court to liberate Geronimo's remains from Fort Sill, Yale University "and wherever else they may be found" -- who knows?

"His bones are still there as a prisoner of war," Clark said in his mellow drawl, referring to Fort Sill. Then he caught himself: "His bones for the most part are still there. . . . In this lawsuit we're going to find out whether the bones are there or not. . . . It's important to his people and justice and the future and how we treat the planet and each other."

The planet? Clark is nothing if not a big-issue man.

Two television cameras and a handful of reporters took it all down.

Geronimo was one of the last to lead Indians into battle against the U.S. Army and white settlers. It was said that he had magical powers. He so constantly outfoxed the Army that it put 5,000 soldiers into the hunt for him and his last band of three dozen warriors.

His surrender in 1886 marked the beginning of an American legend. He appeared in Wild West shows. Teddy Roosevelt invited him to ride a horse in the 1905 inaugural parade. Paratroopers shouted his name as they leapt into the void. Indian activists found him an inspiration.

So good at eluding capture in life, how could he go missing in death?

For now, Geronimo's remains lie under a pyramid monument made of stone in the Apache Prisoner of War Cemetery at Fort Sill.

Or maybe not. His skull might have been spirited to New Haven, Conn.,where it could be featured in ghoulish rituals of the secretive student society Skull and Bones, at Yale, to which have belonged three generations of Bushes.

Then, too, perhaps the warrior is not really "still in imprisonment," as Harlyn Geronimo insists. Maybe the remains are free to be removed from the U.S. Army post -- if only the Apaches could make up their minds where they belong. There are factions, and they disagree.

Clark treated the reporters to an extemporaneous disquisition on the Apaches, touching on their linguistic roots in Siberia and their first contact with the Spaniards in the 1500s. His legal complaint quotes a wide variety of sources, including Willa Cather's "Death Comes for the Archbishop."

The defendants are Obama, the secretaries of defense and the Army, Yale and the Order of Skull and Bones. If the lawsuit is successful, Geronimo -- all of him -- will be reburied where he was born in 1829 in New Mexico.

In his autobiography, the warrior wrote: "I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains."

Harlyn Geronimo suspects his great-grandfather's skull is being fetishized by undergraduates in New Haven. The latest support for this claim was uncovered two years ago by a researcher at Yale. It's a June 1918 letter from one Bonesman to another, Winter Mead to F. Trubee Davison:

"The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club . . . is now safe inside [the clubhouse] together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn."

Another account alleges that Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, was one of the graverobbers.

"It's all a bunch of poppycock," said Towana Spivey, a Geronimo expert, a Chickasaw, and director of the Fort Sill National Historic Landmark Museum. He was on the phone from Fort Sill. "He's still buried where he was originally."

Spivey says he is so certain because the Apaches deliberately misled outsiders as to the location of the grave, and a description of the tomb the Yalies allegedly found doesn't match Geronimo's. Over the years, representatives of Skull and Bones have denied the club has the skull.

What's more, says Spivey, Clark and Geronimo have it wrong. The Army is not keeping Geronimo's remains captive. It is the Apaches, not the Army, who decide who stays and who goes from the cemetery.

The catch is, Spivey refers to the Fort Sill Apaches, the descendants of those members of Geronimo's group who stayed in Oklahoma. Harlyn Geronimo is part of a different group, the Mescalero Apaches, descendants of those who relocated to New Mexico.

"I believe it would be inappropriate to desecrate Geronimo's grave and remove him," says Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apaches.

Clark says his clients, as blood descendants of Geronimo, have greater legal standing to control the grave. Let the chiefs in Washington sort it out, then, if not the Apaches.

Their Washington business done, Geronimo and his wife dashed for Reagan National Airport. At the airport, before going through security, he took off his medicine beads.