As Plundered Items Return to Wounded Knee, Decisions Await

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 two 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 that 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 that 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 on Dec. 29 to mark the anniversary of the massacre and the return of the collection.