The possibility that he passed the knowledge to specific people who passed it to others, and that it still lives in specific family memory, is also real.

Worm is the figure through whom the continuity of the burial knowledge would most naturally have been maintained.

His choices in the days after his son’s death shaped the protection that has lasted nearly 150 years.

The Agency System And What It Did To Knowledge

The reservation era — specifically the period from the 1880s through the 1930s — saw the implementation of federal policies that were explicitly designed to disrupt the transmission of Indigenous culture and knowledge.

The boarding school system, which removed children from their families and communities and prohibited them from speaking their languages or practicing their cultural traditions, was the most systematic of these disruptions.