Washington ? Nearly 70 years after his death, the remains of Black Horse, a Cheyenne Indian warrior and ancestor of Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, will be made whole. Bone shards stored by the military for more than a century will be buried at his grave site in Montana this weekend.

Black Horse was a warrior in the Cheyenne resistance to the military campaign against American Indians in the late 19th century. He fought with Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Big Horn and helped the Cheyenne escape government imprisonment and flee back to Montana.

“It’s a wake, a burial ceremony, but also a celebration that part of him is coming home,” said Campbell, the great-grandson of Black Horse. “For me it is, as Indians say, closing the hoop.”

Campbell, R-Colo., who keeps the rusted, bone-handled knives Black Horse used at Little Big Horn in his Senate office, said there would be three days of prayers and sweatlodge ceremonies culminating with the burial of the shards of bone on Sunday.

“It’s very important for Indian people to have their whole skeleton, to have their body buried, because the spirit isn’t at rest until the whole body is put in ground,” said Herman J. Viola, curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, who has written several books about Indians.

Black Horse’s bones are just one set of remains among more than 27,000 that the government has catalogued and made available for heirs or tribes to claim since Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, said Paula Malloy, a program officer.

The government has an estimated 200,000 sets of American Indian remains.

The shards of Black Horse’s bones were removed from his leg in 1879 by an Army surgeon at Fort Keogh, Mont., after Black Horse and about 300 Cheyenne Indians had fled from Army captors in Oklahoma.

They had no supplies and stole horses and food from white settlers along the way, Viola said, and in one raid Black Horse was shot twice by a pair of ranchers.

One bullet hit his side and the other shattered his left thigh and lodged in his right. He dragged himself out of the house and escaped. It was two months before he was treated by the Army surgeon.

The bones were sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, which was established during the Civil War to study the effects of war wounds. The Army kept the bone fragments until they were inventoried as part of the NAGPRA program and claimed by Black Horse’s great-grandson, Gilbert Brady.

After the government allowed the Cheyenne to settle in Montana, Black Horse enlisted as an Army scout and spent his later years tending his vegetable garden, Campbell said. He died in 1936, and was buried with an Army-issue headstone. That’s where the bone shards will be buried.