LOCL DESCENDANTS TO ATTEND CHIEF'S BURIAL; LOKOTA CHIEF TO BE REBURIED AFTER 105 YEARS

After 105 years in a British cemetery, the remains of Lakota Chief Long Wolf will be returned home to Wounded Knee, S.D., for burial.

His great-granddaughter and great-great-grandson of Cape Girardeau will be there. Mary Red Hawk Nave and her grandson Cody Nave, 7, will take part in the tribal ceremonies.

Nave said bringing Long Wolf's body home is important. "They say the spirit can't rest unless you are on your own land," Nave said.

A British woman, intrigued by a story of Chief Long Wolf and his burial that she read in an antique book, tracked down his gravesite and relatives.

Long Wolf, a warrior who apparently was wounded in battles with the U.S. Cavalry, died of pneumonia in 1892, while performing with "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West show at Earl's Court in west London. He was 57.

Cody buried Long Wolf at Brompton cemetery in the same grave as a 17-month-old girl in the troupe known as Star, daughter of another Sioux, Ghost Dog. The body of Star, who died after falling from a horse, also will be returned to the United States.

Nave explained that Long Wolf's funeral ceremony will include dancing, singing, a blessing with inhaling of smoke from burning sage, and giving of gifts in the chief's honor. As descendants of Long Wolf, Nave and her grandson will participate in the ceremony.

After Long Wolf died, his wife and children, including Nave's grandmother, Hannah, returned to the United States. But they were unable to take his body with them.

As the years passed, the family lost track of where the body lay.

Elizabeth Knight of Worcestershire in central England, came across a book in a local antique market that contained a lament on Long Wolf's tragic life and burial.

In it, the adventurer and politician Robert Cunningham Grahame recorded that Long Wolf lay in a "neglected grave in a lone corner of a crowded London cemetery."Moved by the story, Knight set out to find Long Wolf's grave. She then tracked down his descendants by placing advertisements in American publications.

Back in the United States, Long Wolf's descendants, including Nave's great-aunt Jessie Black Feather, 87, were searching for his grave.

John Black Feather, who is Jessie's son, said he "couldn't believe it" when he saw the advertisement in a South Dakota newspaper.

The State Department and the British government soon exchanged letters, setting off a four-year bureaucratic process.

The family plans to bury Long Wolf at the ancestral burial ground of the Oglala Sioux tribe at the Pine Ridge Reservation, Wounded Knee. Further investigations into Long Wolf's life have uncovered the report of an autopsy performed in 1892 at the West London Hospital which described a body "covered in gunshot wounds and saber cuts," believed to have been inflicted during Indian battles with the Cavalry.

Long Wolf, according to family legend, was among the warriors who wiped out Gen. George Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. but they ultimately were defeated. Rather than join his fellow Lakota in subjugation, Long Wolf joined Buffalo Bill's performers.

Today, a horse-drawn carriage will bear the bodies of Long Wolf and Star, wrapped in buffalo hide, to a farewell service at a nearby chapel attended by a shaman, or medicine man. The bodies will then be flown to the United States. Funeral ceremonies here will begin Saturday and burial is set for Sunday.

Some information for this story was provided by the Associated Press.