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This story was originally published by ICT.

After a half-century of uncertainty, all Cheryl Buswell-Robinson wants is the body of her husband, Perry Ray Robinson, to be returned.

In March 1973, Robinson called home to Alabama from a conference in Taos, New Mexico, to tell his wife he planned to join the American Indian Movement’s takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation where tribal members were protesting then-tribal president Dick Wilson.

“He thought it was going to be the spark to light the prairie fire,” Buswell-Robinson said. “I said, I didn’t think that was going to happen and I wanted him to come home.”

Being the 1970s, Buswell-Robinson didn’t hear back from her husband for a while, and there wasn’t an easy way to communicate with little access to landlines in an occupied space under near constant FBI surveillance. So that fall, when a caravan from Wounded Knee of Black civil rights activists pulled into the driveway of the Robinson farm in Alabama, Buswell-Robinson expected her husband to be with them.

He wasn’t.

At first, Buswell-Robinson thought her husband may have been arrested by the FBI during the occupation, but soon she discovered in South Dakota the rumor was Robinson was killed in a bunker in Wounded Knee and buried somewhere nearby. When closing its investigation into Robinson’s disappearance in 2014, the FBI confirmed to the family that Robinson was killed in Wounded Knee and buried in an unknown grave, she said.

For her, the situation feels like being stuck in a big, deep hole. Unable to do anything from over one 1,000 miles away, Buswell-Robinson has worked hard over the past five decades to raise the couple’s three children alone with no answers about where her husband is buried.

“I can’t do anything with my kids to make that hole better,” she said. “It’s just there, and it’s impacted our family so badly.”

Buwell-Robinson, now 82, recently survived a stroke and while her family reassured her she still has time, she isn’t so sure. All she wants now is to be buried next to her husband. And if that isn’t possible, she just wants a place for her children, now adults with families of their own, to mourn the civil rights activist who gave his life for what he believed in.

“We’ve never really mourned,” she said. “The tears I cried, I cried in private. I didn’t want the kids to see.”

Nearing the end of 2025, with help from a group of Oceti Sakowin activists and descendants of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre survivors, the family may be closer than ever to finding where Robinson is buried.

Following the closure of the FBI’s investigation into Robinson’s death 11 years ago, documents released to the Robinson family and the public confirmed he had been killed and identified several spots in Wounded Knee where he is likely buried.

While no law enforcement agencies are currently investigating Robinson’s death, a search for his body would be possible through an agreement between the Robinson family and Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Searching for Robinson’s body is especially difficult due to its proximity to the mass graves of those slain at Wounded Knee. The Seventh Cavalry killed nearly 300 Mnicouju Lakota men, women and children from Si Tanka’s band who had traveled south to Pine Ridge from what are now the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations for relief. After the massacre, the military buried Lakotas in mass graves where they’ve remained ever since.

What happened to Ray Robinson in 1973 has weighed heavily on the mind of Justin Baker, a 41-year-old employee of Sinte Gleska University, a tribally controlled institution on the nearby Rosebud Reservation in south-central South Dakota directly east of Pine........

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