The University of Denver Museum of Anthropology recently returned artifacts to the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.
Get top headlines and KUNC reporting directly to your mailbox each week when you subscribe to In The NoCo.
A federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires institutions receiving federal funds to return sacred and culturally significant Indigenous objects to the tribes. It can take some time – the museum started the consultation process in 2022, and the tribes submitted a claim for these objects in 2023.
The museum returned an Arapahoe smoking pipe with a large bowl that was used when tribal members would make decisions, and a smaller black stone pipe that was smoked by the elders.
“The sacred things, such as the pipes…we always want to make sure that those are specially taken care of,” Fred Mosqueda, tribal representative for the repatriation of artifacts, said. “They shouldn’t be out in public.”
Most of the other objects – like arrowheads, fleshing tools, and sewing needles made out of fishbones – were found in Nebraska and Kansas by other people several years ago and sent to the museum. One box of items was abandoned outside an anthropology laboratory in the 70s. The majority of objects returned are believed to be items that were buried with the dead.
“Unfortunately, archeology has a pretty dark past,” Dena Sedar, the NAGPRA manager and registrar at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, said. “And so a lot of times, people would just go out and find sites and dig them up without really any thought as to what they were disturbing.
Sedar said some objects are not appropriate — or necessary — to educate visitors about tribes.
“It isn’t about just emptying the shelves,” she said. “It’s about restitution and giving back what really should never have been taken in the first place.”
Read more about the NAGPRA efforts at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology.
