East Lyme ― Descendants of the Nehantic Tribe working to unearth a forgotten past now plan to bring home the remains of at least two dozen ancestors to be buried again.

A proposal from Lyme-based archaeologist and Nehantic scholar John Pfeiffer was submitted Monday to First Selectman Kevin Seery and Parks and Recreation Director Jerry Lokken.

The Nehantic Native Nation, of which Pfeiffer is an adopted member, is asking for the town’s help to reestablish a roughly 0.13-acre portion of McCook Point Park as the official Nehantic burial ground.

Pfeiffer said the parcel to be set aside “is exclusively for the purpose of burial of Nehantic remains.” It sits at the corner of Atlantic and Columbus avenues in an area spanning the chain link fence to the place known as Lucretia’s Spring, where tradition says a Nehantic woman sat in an interminable wait for her husband to return from a fishing trip.

The bones of the Nehantic ancestors exist now in museum collections and in cemeteries across the state, removed by developers and academics from what was once a 300-acre reservation along Niantic Bay that grew out of the tribe’s ancestral burial grounds at Black Point. Pfeiffer has estimated there were about 450 Nehantics buried on the grounds.

Pfeiffer counted about six or seven of the known remains as part of the Yale Peabody Museum collection in New Haven.

He said a discussion with museum staff members two weeks ago revealed interest in returning the remains to the Nehantic descendants. That’s why the Tribal Council is working now to set up a partnership with the town to reestablish the burial ground.

“We wanted to make sure if we did acquire the material that we had an appropriate place to re-inter them,” he said.

First Selectman Kevin Seery on Monday expressed support for reestablishing the hallowed grounds that are currently overseen by the Parks and Recreation Department.

“At this point we’re going to try to do everything we can to make that happen for the tribe,” he said.

The proposal will have to go before the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Board of Selectmen, according to Seery. He said he plans to invite Pfeiffer to speak at the Sept. 20 meeting of the selectmen.

David Brule, a descendant who lives in Massachusetts, said restoring the sanctity of the cemetery has been a priority of the emergent Nehantic Native Nation Tribal Council on which he sits. He counted about 60 members across eight states, a far-flung family bound by land records and genealogy to a tribe said to have numbered among the thousands over the millennia before it was declared extinct by the state around 1870.

Brule also for two years has been calling for the removal of a statue and some plaques installed by the Parks and Recreation Department that don’t belong on a sacred indigenous burial ground.

The modern additions include a playful statue of a boy and a girl commemorating the Art in the Park Festival going back to 2004 and a more recent memorial plaque placed under a Japanese maple tree for a resident who died in 2019.

Then-recreation director Dave Putnam in October 2021 said the items would be moved. Seery, who became first selectman that December, acknowledged this week they were still there.

“We’re going to very expeditiously make sure that gets repositioned elsewhere,” he said.

The members of the tribal council continue to object to a stone marker on the site identifying it as the burying ground of an “extinct” tribe.

Pfeiffer has described more than three decades of “all consuming” research into the Nehantic people that started with the discovery of bones in the basement of a Crescent Beach home. His stated goal is to right a wrong perpetrated by the state with the declaration of extinction and the failure to keep a promise to preserve the burying grounds in perpetuity.

“We’re still here,” he said. “We’re not extinct.”

Among the collection of remains at the Yale museum is a young Nehantic woman discovered by amateur archaeologists in 1946 on Pennsylvania Avenue in the vicinity of Smith Cove. The Day back then reported the woman, estimated at 20 years old based on a “perfect set of teeth,” was found in a reclining position with two arrowheads lodged in her chest cavity. Officials at the time estimated the grave to be about 300 years old.

Town Historian Liz Kuchta, who grew up across the street from the exhumation site, said she remembers taking a field trip to the museum as an elementary school student.

“All the boys were excited because they wanted to look at the dinosaurs, and I wanted to go right to the Native American exhibit because I knew she was there,” Kuchta said. “I went there and I spent as much time as I could looking at her and the display the Peabody had set up about her.”

Now, Kuchta is among those who want to bring the young woman home again.

She described her youthful connection to the woman as “one of those emotional things.”

“I guess it was because she had been found so close to where I lived,” she said. “I felt this attachment to her.”

The federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires museums, academic institutions and government agencies to work with descendants and tribes to return any human remains, funerary objects and other sacred objects in their collections. It was established in 1990.

The Yale Peabody Museum on its website said the organization over the past 30 years has worked “to repatriate the remains of individuals callously collected in the past.”

“Though hundreds of repatriations have been completed, there is a great deal more work to do,” the website said. “In partnership with the university, we are increasing staff and funding to support these efforts and remain committed to doing all we can to ensure that these ancestors go home.”

According to data compiled by the news outlet ProPublica, Yale University as of April still had the remains of at least 300 Native Americans.

The museum’s repatriation registrar could not be reached by press time.

Pfeiffer said he is aware of more remains housed at the Yale museum because he borrowed its skeletal collections back in the 1970s, when he found at least a half dozen burials that could be traced to the Nehantic Tribe.

He said about another dozen Nehantic remains were excavated under his supervision as part of a project at Wesleyan University. The remains were reinterred at a site in Farmington by the office of then-state archeologist Nicholas Bellantoni, according to Pfeiffer.

“No one ever consulted me about it,” he said. “They took them out of my office at Wesleyan.”

Still more remains were removed directly from the tribe’s burial grounds in the late 1800s, according to Pfeiffer. That’s when developer James Luce of the White Beach Hotel was granted permission by the state to remove the cemetery for aesthetic purposes despite a colonial court ruling that gave the tribe "the Perpetual use of their Burying Place."

Though the state approval came with a proviso that Luce move all who were buried there, Pfeiffer said only a few Nehantics were reburied in Union Cemetery on East Pattagansett Road.

East Lyme Cemetery Association president Terry Cavanaugh said Monday she was not aware of the request to move the Nehantic remains from Union Cemetery back to their original resting place. She said she would do her due diligence to research the issue.

e.regan@theday.com