A 1990 law was meant to “expeditiously return” such items to Native Americans, but descendants are still waiting.
Wind flutters around the peace offerings of tobacco ties that line the fence at the Wounded Knee Memorial on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, on October 20, 2014.
Since NAGPRA’s passage, the AMNH has communicated sporadically with the Oglala Lakota, including sending a notification in November 1993 regarding hundreds of objects in its collections that might be affiliated with the tribe. The vague descriptions of the artifacts made no mention of Wounded Knee. James W. Bradley, a former director of the Andover, Massachusetts, museum now known as the Robert S. Peabody Institute of Archaeology,: “We basically didn’t know what we had, and we had pretty good catalog control. But intellectual control — knowing what it was, making it available — we really didn’t know.” The law forced the museum “to do what we just had never gotten around to doing, which is to clean up our mess, find out what we had collected, what we had excavated,” he said.
The burden of researching the origin of the objects, some of them hundreds of years old, fell to tribal communities, White Plume said. If there’s a record that an object was from the Oglala Lakota, it should be given back without hesitation, he said, “yet they’re sitting there waiting for us to describe in detail the item that we want back.”
About two weeks later, Mnicoujou Lakota Chief Spotted Elk, who was also known as Big Foot, surrendered with his band to members of the 7th Cavalry. On Dec. 29, soldiers ordered the band of people, who had settled near Wounded Knee Creek, to turn over their weapons. A Lakota man’s weapon discharged, setting off a flurry of gunfire as adults and children ran for cover.. Soldiers had surrounded the Lakota when the gunfire erupted. “The shooting was in every direction.
Yellow Bull, a Marine veteran, father of six and local county commissioner, is determined to continue preserving the memory of Wounded Knee, he said, including improving the site, protecting it from development and reclaiming the objects that were taken from those who were killed.Cassie Dowdle, a NAGPRA manager for the 900-person Wilton Rancheria tribe, based south of Sacramento, said she has seen inequities in the resources tribes have for pursuing repatriations.
The park service provides some grants to fund consultation and repatriation work to improve communication between the institutions and Indigenous communities, including researching museums’ collections. But some tribes don’t have the resources to navigate the grant writing process.to museums and tribes, the most since 1994. Even so, grants won’t cover the entire cost of a repatriation, said Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage Institute and a Tlingit citizen.
When the repatriation process fails, it’s frequently because museums are not “taking enough responsibility — moral responsibility — for finding ways forward with tribes,” Colwell said. “And then tribes often just don’t have the resources.”
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