How to handle returned Native items?
At a hilltop cemetery in Wounded Knee, S.D., the site of one of the bloodiest massacres by American soldiers against Native Americans, a small crowd gathered around a cluster of boxes that had been laid reverently atop 2 feet of snow.
Inside were Lakota cultural objects and belongings that had been returned after more than a century on the other side of the country: moccasins, sacred pipes, ritual clothing, beaded leather bags. Some are believed to have been taken from Wounded Knee immediately after the 1890 massacre, when U.S. troops killed as many as 300 or more Lakota men, women and children.
Since the 1890s the collection had been kept in a small-town library museum in Barre, Mass., now known as the Founders Museum, sitting among displays of Victorian-era dolls, Civil War artifacts and taxidermy. But last year, after decades of anguished requests and false starts, the museum agreed to give the Oglala Sioux Tribe the items it had sought.
It has been more than three decades since Congress passed a law setting up a protocol for federally funded colleges and museums to return Native cultural heritage and, in many cases, human remains. The pace of restitutions has been slow, frustrating tribes that are awaiting the return of their plundered patrimony. But now, amid signs more institutions are beginning to repatriate Native holdings, citizens of tribes like the Oglala Sioux find themselves confronting complicated questions about how to handle returns in ways that honor the dead and the past, and facilitate healing for the living.
There is broad consensus human remains should be buried. Many call for burying or burning other objects as well — especially funerary items
— in accordance with spiritual practices. Others would like to see items preserved and displayed for educational purposes in museums run by tribes, or restored to the descendants of those they were taken from.
“We need to listen to everybody, and we have to be patient,” Ivan Looking Horse, who had relatives killed at Wounded Knee, said at a ceremony Dec. 29 to mark the anniversary of the massacre and the return of the collection.
There are 574 federally recognized Native nations plus hundreds of others, all with their own practices, noted Shannon O’Loughlin, CEO for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that assists Native nations and Indigenous people with repatriation.
“It’s the tribe’s prerogative however they wish to utilize or reinvigorate the item,” said O’Loughlin, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
As of last year, fewer than onethird of the museums subject to the federal repatriation law had made all of the human remains in their collections available to tribes, leaving the remains of more than 100,000 people in limbo. The government recently proposed new regulations to speed the process.
The Peabody Museum at Harvard University is working to return a collection of hair taken from Native American children who were forced to attend government-run boarding schools. Martina Minthorn, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma, said her relatives would receive hair shorn from her grandmother’s sister. She said they planned to place the hair on top of her grave site, where the wind could scatter it.
Tribal officials say they are seeing more voluntary returns outside the federal law.
In Oklahoma, the offices of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes recently received a 19th-century buckskin hairpiece, a necklace decorated with carved antlers and other items from a collector.
At the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum in western New York, two men showed up with a Trader Joe’s bag full of bones they said had come from their grandfather’s attic.
“I think it’s finally sinking in that people are starting to identify us as human beings and not as scientific specimens in need of study,” said Joe Stahlman, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Seneca Nation.