Natives fight for items looted from bodies at Wounded Knee
With the flashlight from her smartphone, Renee Iron Hawk peered into the dust-covered glass and wood cabinets inside a small, dark museum in Barre, Mass.
She and a handful of other American Indians looked at pairs of beaded moccasins, a dozen ceremonial pipes and a few cradleboards, used by women to carry infants on their backs. The items are among as many as 200 artifacts that were stolen from the bodies of the 250 Lakota men, women and children slaughtered by the U.S. Army in 1890 during the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota. They’d ended up in an obscure museum attached to a public library in a rural town 70 miles from Boston.
Some of the items were sold by gravediggers to Frank Root, a traveling shoe salesman from Barre, who used them as part of his Wild West roadshow before he donated them in 1892 to the town’s museum, where they’ve stayed for more than a century. They are among the more than 780,000 burial items and possessions of Native Americans held in museums or other institutions as of September 2021, according to a report to Congress.
“It’s a stolen collection,” Iron Hawk said of the Barre objects. “Just like they stole our lands; it’s the same.”
Now she, her husband, Manny, and their group, HAWK 1890 — which stands for Heartbeat at Wounded Knee and includes American Indians whose relatives were slain in or survived the massacre — have launched an effort to have the items returned to their tribes, the Oglala Lakota and Cheyenne River Sioux.
Earlier this year, they seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough. But the deal they struck this spring with officials from the Barre Museum Association has stalled, leaving the Indians fearing a repeat of the country’s long history of broken promises to Native Americans.
Museum officials insist that is not the case but also say they must follow protocols to ensure that the objects are returned properly.
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, requiring museums and institutions that receive federal funding to return any Native American remains or objects to their rightful owners. But the law has loopholes, and regaining possession of items can sometimes involve long, expensive legal battles.
“Native Americans are the last group of people who have to fight for the right to have claims to things that are theirs,” said Valerie J. Grussing, the executive director of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers. “That’s outrageous.”
For decades, Lakotas tried to get some of the stolen items back from the Barre Museum but got little response.
Then, in 2000, Leonard Little Finger — an Oglala Lakota and a descendant of Chief Big Foot — successfully lobbied the Barre Museum to return a lock of the chief’s hair after proving through a tribal court that he was related to him.
Little Finger said in a 2010 letter to the National Park Service that Ann E. Meilus — the president of the Barre Museum Association’s board — had called him in 2007 asking for advice because activist groups were “demanding the return” of the Wounded Knee items. He met with her and the museum board in Barre, and they discussed donating items to the Journey Museum in Rapid City, S.D. But Meilus said in an interview that Journey officials wanted the “whole collection, not just the items from Wounded Knee,” which the board was not willing to grant.
“We felt that was not the proper thing to do because we had other tribes come, and they blessed the museum, and they really liked the way the museum presented the items, so we felt that we would be dishonoring the other tribes,” Meilus said.
Still, many in the Wounded Knee descendants group wanted to pursue getting the items returned.
This year, a Vermont-based activist contacted Oglala Lakota leaders to help push for the return of the objects.
In April, Manny and Renee Iron Hawk, along with Chief Henry Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota Nation, flew more than 1,800 miles to Boston. They had been invited to see the items and meet with officials from the Barre Museum Association. They were accompanied by a few other American Indians from tribes in the Massachusetts area: the Nipmuc and the Wampanoags.
When they arrived, the Iron Hawks said, they’d barely gotten out of their cars when a representative of the museum association board met them in the parking lot and told them what seemed like good news: The board had held a brief meeting before they arrived and taken a vote. They’d decided to return the items.
Manny and his wife said they were surprised and a bit skeptical.
“I really didn’t believe it,” Manny said.
The Native Americans met with about six museum association board members, most of whom are white. The board members had questions: Where would the Native Americans store the items? Would they be damaged? Would they be sold?
Renee Iron Hawk said she found their inquiries insulting.
The board members also set a few stipulations. They wanted to hire an expert to do an inventory and check the authenticity of the items — work that the Iron Hawks and other Natives in their group think is unnecessary.
After they ate some sandwiches, the Native Americans were allowed to view the items. They were told not to take pictures — a museum policy — and not to touch anything because items probably had been treated with arsenic to preserve them.
Once back in South Dakota, the Iron Hawks and their supporters said they expected to hear from the museum board about the logistics of getting the items back. But they didn’t.
Meilus, the museum board’s president, said the board wanted to ensure an inventory and analysis of the items was done to ensure that they were authentic and had come from Wounded Knee.
Meilus and the board also want the HAWK 1890 members to get formal resolutions passed by their respective tribal councils so the transfer of the Wounded Knee items has broader support than “just a group of individuals who is making this request.”
The Native Americans view the museum association’s bureaucratic demands as delaying tactics.
“They said they were going to give them back verbally,” Manny said. “Now they seem to have changed their mind and gone back on their word about returning them to us.”