Harvard Returns Standing Bear’s Tomahawk To Nebraska Tribe

BOSTON (AP) — A tomahawk after owned by Chief Standing Bear, a pioneering Native American civil legal rights chief, has been returned to his tribe soon after staying housed for a long time in a museum at Harvard University.

Members of the Ponca tribes in Nebraska and Oklahoma frequented the Massachusetts college on June 3 for the ceremonial return of the artifact, the tribes reported in a latest announcement.

Standing Bear experienced initially gifted the pipe-tomahawk to 1 of his attorneys just after winning the 1879 court circumstance that designed him one of the initial Native Americans granted civil rights.

The tomahawk altered palms many occasions ahead of remaining obtained by Harvard in 1982.

“This is a great homecoming and a great action in the lots of ways we have to do to get back to our identification, to our means of our persons,” Angie Starkel, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska who made the journey to Cambridge, said in a assertion.

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

“We communicate about generational trauma, but we really do not converse about generational therapeutic, and which is what we’re accomplishing now,” she reported in a assertion. “This is therapeutic.”

Jane Pickering, director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, said the tomahawk’s return demonstrates the institution’s drive to repair earlier harms.

“The Peabody directly benefited from accumulating tactics that we admit today overlooked the wishes and values of households and communities,” she said in a assertion.

Harvard and the museum have faced criticism about the rate of repatriating Native American remains and other sizeable objects to tribes, as required less than federal regulation.

The museum and tribes have been doing the job on the tomahawk’s return for extra than a yr tribal customers have been slated to journey to campus just before pandemic-similar constraints last yr delayed it.

The Ponca tribes say they will announce options to show the tomahawk at a afterwards day.

They have been among the many forcibly relocated from their homelands to other territories by the federal governing administration in the 1800s.

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

In his landmark federal demo, he efficiently argued for the recognition of Indigenous Individuals as folks entitled to rights and security beneath legislation.