Curly Head Jack comes home

Headless human remains in a drawer in the Smithsonian turn out to have a heartbreaking history and a living family  

July 1, 2007

JULIE SULLIVAN

The Oregonian

The letter dropped through the mail slot at the Portland hair salon and found the man who grew up hating who he was. The idea that you could change your life by changing your appearance had drawn owner Harvi Hood into the beauty business, where customers often misread his brown skin and black hair.

Filipino? Yeah, he'd say.

Japanese? Sure.

But time uncovers all bones.

The letter arrived in 2004, the result of a Smithsonian Institution search for descendants of 4,000 Native Americans whose bodies were collected during the Indian wars.

Harvi Hood is one of those descendants.

For as long as he could remember, Hood asked, "God, why was I ever born an Indian? I am worthless. What hope is there for me?"

The youngest child of a Modoc father and Klamath mother, Hood grew up on south-central Oregon's Klamath Reservation, where three rival tribes had been forced together decades earlier. He'd drink with Klamath and Paiute friends who would try to stomp each other to death a few hours later. By 21 he'd spent two years in reform school, bounced out of the U.S. Army and been stabbed twice and shot in the face once, a bullet fragment remaining in his jaw. He dreamed of going out in a blaze of gunfire. "I loved," he recalls, "to make people bloody."

He was almost 30 when he woke up in his Portland apartment after a night of drinking. He'd come to attend barber school, but he couldn't seem to finish. Hood's young wife, Connie, had left, taking their little daughter. "When you're brown and you hate being brown," he recalls, "it's hell." That morning, he began to pray.

By the time he got up, Hood says, he felt certain there was a God and that he could change. He went to church, his devotion first frightening his skeptical wife and then drawing her back. He went to Bible college. He finished hairstyling school, eventually traveling to France and England , where he trained with Vidal Sassoon. He encouraged Connie to also became a hairstylist, and the couple worked side by side in Portland and Beaverton .

Still, he'd erupt for no reason, once pummeling a stranger in a fit of road rage. He prayed to understand and eventually decided his anger stemmed from his relationship with his harsh and often cruel father. The old Modoc, raised in a boarding school, had gone to Indian college and worked at a post office and a mill.

Hood realized that forgiving his father set him free of old wounds. For two years after, Hood took the bus to Klamath County every weekend, ministering and apologizing to people he'd wronged. He focused on reconciliation: conducting ceremonies for the Klamath Tribes, for the Willamette River , in Washington , D.C. , and for native people from Alaska to Argentina .

In Portland , he became a spiritual force at Native American funerals: "There is a God," he told mourners. "He can restore you; he can heal your broken hearts."

In early September 2003, Risa Diemond Arbolino settled into her Smithsonian Institution office and studied the file of human remains labeled No. 42109. An anthropologist at the Museum of Natural History , she works to connect skeletal remains and funerary objects to present-day tribes. To find descendants, the staff relies on records, archaeology, oral traditions, biology, settlement patterns and artifacts.

Her job is part of one of the most significant movements in the worlds of art and archaeology: the repatriation of valuable objects and artifacts to their original homes. It includes demands from countries such as Italy, Greece and Egypt that works that were smuggled or sold illegally to collectors and museums in other countries be returned. It includes the return to Jewish families of artworks stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis. And it includes the return to their own people of indigenous remains across the globe, from the Maori of New Zealand to Native American tribes.

After Congress passed the National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989, the Smithsonian began the long process of repatriating the remains of 18,000 Indians. Archaeologists, individuals and museum curators collected most of them. But thousands came from the Army Medical Museum , where by order of the surgeon general, about 4,000 Indian bodies had been collected from battlefields and burial grounds. Many had their heads cut off, to satisfy curator George Otis' interest in the study of skulls -- since discredited -- to explain intellectual differences between peoples. Arbolino and others at the Museum of Natural History have repatriated 5,400 remains since the 1989 law was passed.

Arbolino was trying to find remains affiliated with the Klamath Tribes, including the Modoc, Klamath and the Yahooskin Band of the Snake Paiute, when she came across a July 15, 1873, letter by Army Surgeon Edwin Bentley: "These are the bones of Curly Head Jack, who died June 8, while encamped at Lost River, a prisoner with the Modoc Indians en route from the peninsula on the Tule Lake to Fort Klamath."

Arbolino felt a thrill. Finding a name was rare, and she carried it to a meeting later that month with Gerald Skelton Jr., director of the Culture and Heritage Department for the Klamath Tribes. She also wrote the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma. She found a photograph of Curly Head Jack taken shortly before he died. "Incredible," she said.

Skelton was thrilled, too. He knew a witness to the Modoc Wars had written a book naming Curly Head Jack and his two brothers, including "one of our best educated men, Charles S. Hood." Hood's grandsons were Harvi and his brother Julian Hood of Portland .

"We have," the Klamath Tribes e-mail to Arbolino proclaimed: "a descendant!"

Few fought the settlement of Oregon so fiercely -- or paid so dearly for their resistance -- as the Modocs.

The tribe of 400 survived measles, Gold Rush miners and vicious skirmishes with settlers near their vast home on the Oregon-California border until the endless stream of newcomers squeezed them onto the Klamath Reservation in 1864.

But maltreated by their Klamath neighbors and allotted only half a blanket apiece, they eventually ran out of food. The ate their horses, but eventually those, too, were gone. In 1872 a band of 160, led by Kientpoos, or Captain Jack, headed for their lush fishing grounds at Lost River .

But land speculators coveted the land along the river, too. Officials ordered the Indians back to the reservation.

Captain Jack said it was better to die quickly from a bullet than slowly from starvation. And the Modocs melted into the volcanic catacomb of what is now the Lava Beds National Monument . For nearly six months, 50 warriors held off hundreds of U.S. soldiers.

On Good Friday, 1873, negotiators summoned by President Ulysses S. Grant met with Captain Jack. But any hope of peace ended when Captain Jack, egged on by his men, shot Maj. Gen. Edward R. Canby, the highest-ranking U.S. officer to die in the Indian wars. The Modocs also killed a commissioner and badly wounded another man.

The nation erupted. Seven weeks later, the band was captured and marched to Fort Klamath , where Captain Jack and other leaders would hang for war crimes, their families exiled to Oklahoma .

On June 8, 1873 , as captives were being led to the fort, a slender young man named Curly Head Jack died of a gunshot wound to the head. A witness said Curly Head Jack (sometimes known as Curley Haired Jack) announced he would rather kill himself than give the soldiers the satisfaction of seeing him hang, and family members believe his mother somehow smuggled a pistol to him. But Gerald Skelton thinks Oregon vigilantes who stopped the entourage murdered Jack.

All agree the Modocs wept, thinking Curly Head Jack had been buried. But in fact, the Army surgeon shipped his body to the Army Medical Museum in Washington , D.C. , where his head was cut off and lost. His remains were transferred in 1898 to the National Museum of Natural History, most recently to a drawer in a fourth-floor room overlooking the National Mall in Washington , D.C.

Three years after the letter arrived, Hood, 68, and his brother Julian, 72, walk through the Smithsonian, through a cubicle farm not unlike any other government or insurance brokerage.

Julian, who served with the Marines in Korea and later in the Air Force, had pressed the Smithsonian for years to hand over the remains.

"It's actually unbelievable to be here," Harvi says. "Kind of like a dream."

The Hood brothers sit down with Arbolino and Bill Billeck, who manages the repatriation office. They are told they can either pack their ancestor's remains themselves or have the museum do it for them.

"We can do that," Harvi interjects.

"Are you packing the remains?" Julian asks Arbolino. "That would be better for us. We don't know how to pack anything."

It's settled. The museum will pack Curly Head Jack's remains.

Arbolino moves on to the logistics of transporting Curly Head Jack back to Oregon . Next, the paperwork. Officially titled "Memorandum of De-Accession." The brothers read the contracts.

"What's post-cranial remains?" Harvi asks.

"That means . . . ," Arbolino begins.

"Skull wasn't there," Harvi finishes.

"Right," Arbolino says.

"You're welcome to view the remains," Arbolino offers. "You don't have to."

"We want to," Harvi quickly responds.

The group walks down a narrow hallway to Room CE-114. A fan hums loudly. Against the baby-blue wall across from the door is a rectangular table covered with a dark-blue cloth. On the table is a white cardboard box. Harvi uncovers the box and slowly examines the plastic bags inside, each containing bones. He touches the bones with anointing oil. Julian then joins Harvi by the table and takes pictures of the box with his disposable camera. Then he removes an old red Bible from his black messenger bag and silently reads passages regarding Moses, who brought the bones of Joseph back to Israel .

Fifteen minutes later, the group solemnly heads to the conference area. "I can say I'm very satisfied with the way things have been handled," Julian says.

Billeck thanks Harvi and Julian for coming. "There hasn't been a healing of the land," Harvi tells the officials, "but things like this help that happen."

Two days later, Harvi and Julian arrive at Portland International Airport with Curly Head Jack. Julian carried their ancestor onto the flight in a square red canvas bag packed by the Smithsonian.

Connie Hood and her sister, Belindia, run forward to envelop their husbands with hugs. The two Mexican American sisters, who grew up on the reservation, married the two Hood brothers more than 40 years ago. The men lean heavily on their wives as they walk, and Connie starts to cry.

After retrieving the remains, the brothers viewed Klamath and Modoc artifacts at the Smithsonian, visited the Holocaust Museum and paid respects at war memorials to honor their brother killed in Korea . They left Washington , Harvi said, overwhelmed by "death, death and death."

Once home, they met and talked, the bag between them on a table, about what to do next. Where was the right place to bury their ancestor? With other Modocs? With their parents? Many Natives, who grew up hearing that their relatives' skulls were used as ashtrays or sold as novelty pieces, want to keep the final resting place of any remains secret. The brothers stare at historical photos, searching the eyes of Curly Head Jack.

More than ever, Harvi Hood believes, he has to forgive what happened.

"I'm a reconciler," he says. "But I look at these pictures, and these people . . . they had such short lives. They didn't have a chance. Someone came in and said, 'Let's replace you, replace your life. We'll raise your children and educate them. We want you to change.'

"But God created us to be Indians," Hood says. "And it is good to know who you are."

Julie Sullivan: 503-221-8068, juliesullivan@news.oregonian.com. Staff writer Jeff Kosseff contributed the Washington , D.C. , portion of this report.

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