Harvard returns Standing Bear’s tomahawk to Nebraska tribe

BOSTON (AP) — A tomahawk as soon as owned by Chief Standing Bear, a pioneering Native American civil rights chief, has been returned to his tribe after being housed for many years in a museum at Harvard College.

Members of the Ponca tribes in Nebraska and Oklahoma visited the Massachusetts college on June 3 for the ceremonial return of the artifact, the tribes mentioned in a current announcement.

Standing Bear had initially gifted the pipe-tomahawk to certainly one of his attorneys after successful the 1879 court docket case that made him one of many first Native People granted civil rights.

The tomahawk modified fingers a number of occasions earlier than being acquired by Harvard in 1982.

“This can be a good homecoming and a great step within the many steps we’ve got to do to get again to our identification, to our methods of our individuals,” Angie Starkel, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska who made the journey to Cambridge, mentioned in a press release.

Stacy Laravie, a descendant of Standing Bear who can also be the historic preservation officer for the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, agreed.

“We discuss generational trauma, however we don’t discuss generational therapeutic, and that’s what we’re doing now,” she mentioned in a press release. “That is therapeutic.”

Jane Pickering, director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, mentioned the tomahawk’s return displays the establishment’s need to restore previous harms.

“The Peabody immediately benefited from amassing practices that we acknowledge at the moment ignored the desires and values of households and communities,” she mentioned in a press release.

Harvard and the museum have confronted criticism over the tempo of repatriating Native American stays and different vital objects to tribes, as required below federal legislation.

The museum and tribes have been engaged on the tomahawk’s return for greater than a yr; tribal members had been slated to journey to campus earlier than pandemic-related restrictions final yr delayed it.

The Ponca tribes say they are going to announce plans to exhibit the tomahawk at a later date.

They had been amongst many forcibly relocated from their homelands to different territories by the federal authorities within the 1800s.

Standing Bear was arrested 1878 for leaving the tribe’s Oklahoma reservation to be able to fulfill a promise he made to bury his eldest son again of their tribe’s homeland in Nebraska’s Niobrara River Valley.

In his landmark federal trial, he efficiently argued for the popularity of Native People as individuals entitled to rights and safety below legislation.