PUC-RJ 2023

By Dana Hedgpeth

1 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, Massachusetts. 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.

2 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.

3 “Going through those cabinets, looking at these items of our people with the light from our phones, it was just something deep to me,” Iron Hawk said. “It felt like the breath went out of me. I. had to sit down and rest. I. had to say a prayer.”

4 How a collection from one of history’s worst atrocities against American Indians ended up in Barre is almost as painful as the memories of the massacre. 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. “It’s a stolen collection,” Iron Hawk said of the Barre objects. “Just like they stole our lands it’s the same.”

5 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.

6 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. The delays have frustrated the Indians. In fact, without those items in their tribal homelands, Manny Iron Hawk said, they believe their ancestors are in limbo.

7 “For our way of life, when somebody makes their journey to the other side, their spirit has to go and be released,” said Manny, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River tribe and a great-great-grandson of a man killed at Wounded Knee. “That didn’t happen for these ancestors.” He said their items and objects need to be brought back “so we can do the proper ceremony and their spirits can take that journey to the other side. They need to come home.”

8 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. 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.

9 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.

10 Meilus, the museum board’s president, said in late June that the association had received a grant to test the items for arsenic. She 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.

11 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.”

12 But 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.” “We’re used to that as natives,” he said. “People haven’t kept their word to us for centuries.”

Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/07/17/ stolen-wounded-knee-artifacts-native-americans/ Retrieved on: July 19, 2022. Adapted.

According to Renee Iron Hawk, keeping the collection in possession of the Barre Museum is analogous to the