And with perfect timing, the Associated Press reports….

Geronimo’s descendants sue over remains
19th February 2009, 7:00 WST

Descendants of American Indian leader Geronimo are suing the federal government, Yale University and a secret society, seeking custody of the Apache chief’s remains.

Geronimo’s great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, says the family believes the Yale group Skull and Bones took some of the remains in 1918 or 1919 from a burial plot at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He says the descendants believe those remains are kept at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven. He announced the federal lawsuit in Washington on Tuesday, the 100-year anniversary of Geronimo’s death from pneumonia while he was being held at Fort Sill as a prisoner of war.

The family wants the remains sent to New Mexico. They also want the government to turn over any bones still buried at Fort Sill. According to Skull and Bones legend, members – including President George W Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush – dug up Geronimo’s grave when a group of Army volunteers from Yale were stationed at the fort during World War I. Geronimo died in 1909.

Only 15 Yale seniors are asked to join Skull and Bones each year. Alumni include Senator John Kerry, President William Howard Taft, numerous members of Congress, media leaders, Wall Street financiers, the scions of wealthy families and agents in the CIA. Members swear an oath of secrecy about the group and its strange rituals, which are said to include an initiation rite in which would-be members kiss a skull.

Geronimo was a leader of the Chiricahua group of Apaches in the southwestern states of Arizona and New Mexico who waged a guerrilla war in the 1870s and 1880s against the US Army which was trying to remove them from ancestral tribal lands and force them onto reservations. After surrendering for the final time in 1886, Geronimo and his followers were deported as prisoners of war to Florida, spent time in prison in Alabama, and finally ended up under military confinement at Fort Sill. There, Geronimo adopted Christianity, became a successful farmer and ended up a national celebrity with the publication of his autobiography in 1906.

AP