Twenty-four cultural items will return tonight, August 19, to Native American communities after a ceremony at the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, where they have been kept. The Louisville museum’s first repatriation under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) includes objects belonging to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, among them beaded bags, a turtle amulet, and a cradle board.
In 2023, Speed curators began working with tribal representatives to identify which works in the museum’s holdings were subject to repatriation under NAGPRA. The law requires that items tied to a “particular Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization” be returned when requested by a representative or descendant of that group. During a site visit the next year, the team determined that 24 of nearly 100 possible objects were eligible for return, as first reported by Louisville’s Courier Journal.
“Family members can now come back and say, ‘wow, my great grandpa made this,’” Fred Mosqueda, a representative of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, told Hyperallergic. “These items are sacred.”
Among the objects slated for repatriation is a sundance rattle, a Native ceremonial instrument used in rituals across North America. Traditionally made with animal leather, bird feathers, and claws, the rattle is meant to echo the slow movement of a buffalo herd. Another item being returned is a Cheyenne cradle board, traditionally made by women in the community and passed along for use by the tribe’s next expecting mother.
According to Speed Museum Assistant Curator and NAGPRA coordinator Sirene Martin, the items entered the museum’s collection in 1930 as a gift from German-American photographer Frederick Weygold. NAGPRA guidelines were updated in 2024 to expand tribal authority in the repatriation process and require museums to revise inventories of Native objects. Chester Whiteman, another representative of the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, told Hyperallergic that before those changes, museums and institutions “would only let us see what they wanted us to see.”
After the revisions, the American Museum of Natural History in New York returned the remains of 124 Native people and 90 Native cultural artifacts in July 2024, though it still holds thousands of human remains in its collection. Later that year, the National Park Service awarded $3 million in grants for Native repatriation efforts nationwide. “So much of the repatriation is invisible to the public,” Martin told Hyperallergic. “This asks us to bring the human back to the humanities.”
The return comes amid a difficult year for the institution, which dissolved its educational department and laid off nine employees last October, citing financial challenges. Speed Museum chief curator Erika Holmquist-Wall will moderate an evening panel on NAGPRA and the repatriation process with Mosqueda, Whiteman, and Martin. After the discussion and a recessional ceremony, Mosqueda and Whiteman will place the sacred objects into a vehicle and drive them back to their rightful homes in Oklahoma.
Mosqueda and Whiteman said they plan to keep the items in their offices until they can secure a dedicated storage area. “All these articles should be in Native hands,” Whiteman added. “They weren’t made to be put on display. They weren’t made to make money off of. They belong to somebody.”
