GERONIMO, THE great Apache warrior, is not resting in peace. In Washington, his great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo has announced a lawsuit against the US government this week to recover his famous ancestor’s remains.
Geronimo, the younger, projected a sort of authenticity by wearing a Vietnam veterans’ cap, Apache medicine beads, Ray-Ban tinted glasses, a bullfighter’s belt buckle and black boots.
It was the 100th anniversary of his great-grandfather’s death from pneumonia, at 79, while a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. “If remains are not properly buried, the spirit is just wandering, wandering, until a proper burial has been performed,” said the 61-year-old sculptor and actor. The suit has been filed to liberate Geronimo’s remains from Fort Sill, Yale University “and wherever else they may be found”.
“His bones are still there as a prisoner of war,” said Harlyn Geronimo’s lawyer, former US attorney general Ramsey Clark (81). The latter is long a lawyer for esoteric causes – in recent times he has represented Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and the government of North Korea.
Geronimo was one of the last to lead Indians into battle against the US army and white settlers. It was said 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. So good at eluding capture in life, how could he go missing in death? For now, Geronimo’s remains lie under a stone pyramid monument in the Apache Prisoner of War Cemetery at Fort Sill.
Or maybe not. His skull might have been spirited to New Haven, Connecticut, where it could be featuring in ghoulish rituals of the secretive student society Skull and Bones, at Yale, to which three generations of Bushes belonged.
If the suit is successful, Geronimo – all of him – will be reburied in New Mexico where he was born. In his autobiography, he 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 fetishised by undergraduates in New Haven. The latest support for this claim was uncovered two years ago by a researcher at Yale. In a June 1918 letter from one “bonesman” to another: “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 and director of the Fort Sill National Historic Landmark Museum. “He’s still buried where he was originally.”