Native American lawyer calls on Harvard to return ancestral relic
A descendant of a Native American chief and civil rights leader urges Harvard University to repatriate an ancestral heirloom. Ponca chief Standing Bear’s tomahawk – a single-handed axe, is currently displayed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
“This is a morality and justice issue,” Brett Chapman, an attorney in Oklahoma with Ponca, Pawnee and Kiowa heritage, says. Chapman’s maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Chief White Eagle, and Standing Bear shared a common grandparent.
On 29 April, the attorney sent a letter to Jane Pickering, the director of the museum where the tomahawk is displayed. In the letter, Chapman laid out challenges to Harvard’s moral right to possess the relic.
The repatriation demand comes in the wake of the Peabody Museum’s apology for the “pain” the museum caused by its refusal to return Native American objects amid accusations of violating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Strengthening calls for museums, universities and cultural institutions to right historical wrongs are happening at a broader scale across the country.
“The only reason this tomahawk came into Harvard’s possession was because of the illegal, forced removal of Native Americans,” Chapman told the Guardian. “If it hadn’t happened, Standing Bear wouldn’t have needed a white lawyer, and wouldn’t have given the heirloom to him, who then wouldn’t have given it to Harvard.
In 1878, one cold night during the week of Christmas, Standing Bear walked off the government-run Indian reservation in Oklahoma. Along with 29 other members of the Ponca Indian tribe, the chief set out to fulfill his only son’s dying wish: to be buried in the land where he was born, 600 miles north in the White Chalk cliffs overlooking the Missouri River, in what is now Nebraska.
The grueling journey spanned four months, during which time, Standing Bear and the others faced below-zero temperatures. Before they could reach the burial site in Omaha, they were arrested by the US cavalry for having left the Oklahoma reservation.
In March 1879, Native Americans were not yet legally defined as people. Defying orders to forcibly turn the Ponca people around, a sympathetic brigadier general George Crook instead tipped off a local newspaper editor of the Omaha Daily Herald.
News of the matter reached lawyers Andrew Jackson Poppleton and John Webster, who set off to represent Standing Bear pro bono in the Nebraska court. On 12 May 1879, a landmark federal decision declared an Indian as a person within the meaning of the law. As gratitude for representing him, Standing Bear gifted his tomahawk to Webster. Some time afterward, without Standing Bear’s knowledge, the tomahawk was given to Harvard.
“We don’t have any business in Boston,” Chapman says. “We live out here in Oklahoma where they put us; we live in Nebraska, where we’re from. We’re not getting anything out of this arrangement while Harvard gets to put the tomahawk on display.”
Chapman believes that his social media posts along with a radio interview on a local NPR station prompted Harvard to respond to his letter on 5 May stating that the museum would welcome the possibility of dialog.
Chapman has never seen, nor held in his hands the tomahawk that represents a direct link to his past. “Standing Bear carried that tomahawk with him when he walked down to Nebraska,” he says. “You’re holding something that belonged to this man who did something great. And we’re still here today and we can still have a physical touch with that past.”
Harvard declined to provide a comment to the Guardian. While Chapman hopes that Harvard will return the tomahawk under the moral ground, he doesn’t discount repatriating the ancestral heirloom through litigation.
“Harvard has everything to gain from returning it, and nothing to lose but a tomahawk that means nothing to them,” Chapman says.