by Nancy Moses
LeBeau had arranged for us to talk at the reservation’s community health center, so we drove there via a quick tour of Eagle Butte. She told me about her life, how she was raised on the reservation, trained as a nurse, and traveled to Europe during World War II, a stint that won her the French Legion of Honor Medal. After the war, LeBeau returned to Cheyenne River reservation, married a local boy, and raised a family of eight children and thirty grandchildren. She continued her nursing career, eventually retiring as head of the nursing department of the local hospital. But retirement is not really what LeBeau is all about. She’s at the center of a multitude of causes—education, public health, smoking cessation, cultural preservation—the quintessential tribal elder with too much to do to find time to die.
“A young lawyer, John Earl, a Cherokee from Georgia, was touring Europe and saw the Ghost Dance Shirt in an exhibition in Glasgow,”[8] she began. According to newspaper clippings in her files, Earl saw the shirt in a 1992 exhibit entitled Home of the Brave at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. Although he had never seen a Ghost Dance Shirt before, he recognized it immediately and knew its spiritual importance to the Lakota people. When Earl returned home, he contacted Marie Not Help Him, president of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, and she, in turn, enlisted the help of Mario Gonzalez, one of America’s most prominent Indian rights lawyers and a descendent of a warrior who died at Wounded Knee. At the time, there were two branches of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, one at Pine Ridge, the other at Cheyenne River. Gonzalez petitioned the Kelvingrove to repatriate this spiritual object and arranged for delegations from both branches to travel to Scotland. Marcella LeBeau was secretary of the Cheyenne River branch, though not a descendent of Wounded Knee, and since the branch president could not go, she agreed to serve as its representative.
“I knew descendants of Wounded Knee who lived in Cheyenne River,” LeBeau told me. “I know the sadness they hold in their hearts. I just felt compelled that an effort should be made to repatriate the Ghost Dance Shirt. Our youth need to know their history and not forget. And, if I could play a small part in that, I wanted to do it.”
In April 1995, the Wounded Knee Survivors Association representatives arrived in Glasgow, garnering considerable curiosity from the local press. “Sioux on the warpath,” read one headline; “Sioux pow-wow for return of Ghost Shirt,” read another. “Silly, negative things,” said LeBeau. “They clearly didn’t understand us.” The delegation met with the City Council, which has responsibility for overseeing the Kelvingrove, and carefully explained the significance of the massacre at Wounded Knee and the spiritual meaning of the Ghost Dance Shirt.
The Kelvingrove had prepared for the hearings by inviting museum visitors to comment on the repatriation request and by consulting curators from national and international museums. Museum visitors generally endorsed the return, but many of the professionals did not. They worried about precedent, arguing that if the Kelvingrove returned the Ghost Dance Shirt when it was under no legal obligation to do so, then every indigenous people from any place in the globe could come forward to make a claim for other artifacts. The Kelvingrove’s director, Lucian Spaulding, shared the professionals’ point of view and did what he could to derail the reparation process. But he didn’t really have to, for the Indians derailed it themselves. Spaulding had received a letter from the Standing Rock tribe disputing the Survivors Association’s claim and requesting reparation of the Ghost Dance Shirt on the grounds that they, the Standing Rock tribe, were Sitting Bull’s tribe and would display it in their tribal museum. This gave the Kelvingrove reason to deny all claims.
The museum’s curator of history, Mark O’Neill, told a local reporter, “We are sympathetic. I wouldn’t close the door on its repatriation.” He said the decision would be made on ethical, not legal, grounds, balancing the Lakota’s rights to have these objects against the museum’s responsibility to educate the public about the history of the world.
LeBeau and Mario left Glasgow despondent but not defeated. Their quest to reclaim their heritage had engendered substantial public sympathy and attracted a group of local supporters determined to keep the Indians’ claim alive.
By 1998, it was time to try again. The Indians had settled the alternative claim, and there had been considerable movement in Glasgow. The City Council had received so many requests from indigenous people for the return of their material heritage that they had developed a claims and repatriation policy, and were eager to test it on an actual claim. The Lakota’s friends had organized a petition drive, and the newspapers and City Council had invited Glaswegians to express their opinion. “[O]ur whole class voted that the shirt should be returned to its rightful owner,” wrote students of the St. Gerardines Primary School. Another man wrote: “The fact that it [the Ghost Dance Shirt] was taken from the body of a dead Lakota at Wounded Knee and that it has a sacred significance gives the Lakota a unique and irrefutable case for its return.” The Lakota had reason to believe they might succeed.
Again, the Wounded Knee Survivors Association asked LeBeau to join Mario Gonzalez as its representative. A week before they were scheduled to depart, Gonzalez called to say he was unable to go. So, LeBeau went alone, as the entire delegation, accompanied by her son Richard.
“Before we left for Scotland, we searched our genealogy and discovered that my children, on their father’s side, were descendants of a woman named Burnt Thigh, whose name appears on the list of those massacred at Wounded Knee. This made Richard a descendant,” Marcella LeBeau said.
On November 13, 1998, the Glasgow City Council’s Arts and Culture Committee held a public hearing about the repatriation of the Wounded Knee Ghost Dance Shirt. The room was packed—in fact, so many wanted to attend that the City Council held a public lottery for the seats. Mark O’Neil, the curator of the Kelvingrove, framed the discussion, describing the final disposition of the Ghost Dance Shirt as a moral question that spoke to the role of museums in society:
The choice of whether or not to return the Wounded Knee artifacts[9] is a central issue, not because it creates a precedent for other returns, but because it reflects exactly what museums are all about. It forces us to ask whether museums can possess objects such as these and still provide places for exploring our values, for discussing what is right or wrong, what relationship we wish for between ourselves and other peoples, what our obligations toward the past, present, and future are, and where museums fit on the spectrum from the sacred and the spiritual to the secular and the materialistic.
This time LeBeau was prepared. She had spent hours at the kitchen table handwriting a detailed brief. She also brought along a replica of the Ghost Dance Shirt to leave in place of the original. She and her daughter had sewn the garment themselves out of “treaty cloth,” using another Ghost Dance Shirt as a model. As it turned out, her community, Cheyenne River, owns a number of Ghost Dance Shirts and other artifacts from Wounded Knee. When LeBeau spoke, she gave the replica Ghost Dance Shirt to one of the councilwomen, who formally accepted it for the museum. Her son, Richard LeBeau, shared his concern about Indian youth. The audience was clearly moved.
“As we spoke, people said there was sobbing in the audience,” remembered LeBeau. “Even a reporter later wrote there was a tear in his own eye.”
A few days later, the Glasgow City Council voted to repatriate the Ghost Dance Shirt to the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, but with some conditions. The Association had to agree not to bury the shirt, which often happens with funerary objects. Instead, it had to be displayed in a museum where the conditions were environmentally controlled, to assure that it would be preserved for posterity. That’s when the South Dakota State Historical Society stepped in.
In summer of 1999, the Ghost Dance Shirt traveled, along with a delegation from Glasgow, back to the United States, and hit a final roadblock. U.S. Customs refused to allow it to enter the country because it had an eagle feather, and eagles are an endangered species. The lawyers soon solved t
hat problem, and the shirt was on its way back to South Dakota. The garment was welcomed at LeBeau’s Cheyenne River community before it traveled to Wounded Knee, where the Oglala Sioux tribe staged an event. As the crowd was walking up the hillside from the killing field to the cemetery, someone saw a spotted eagle flying overhead, a very special moment. This was followed by a reception at the South Dakota Cultural Heritage Center, where the Ghost Dance Shirt remains today.
Marcella LeBeau is pleased that the Ghost Dance Shirt is displayed in a secluded area with other materials from Wounded Knee. “I think people need to see it,” she said. “It helps with the healing.”
“Healing?” I asked.
She stopped for a moment, and then took a breath. “My grandfather Joseph For Bear was forced to give up his ways of life as a Lakota and live their ways, the white man’s ways. At age ten, my mother died and my father didn’t have the wherewithal to care for me. I was sent to a boarding school where I could not speak my language and the teachers said that Indians were dirty, we couldn’t be anything. That does something to you as a child.
“The federal government called Wounded Knee a battle. They gave twenty soldiers the Congressional Medal of Honor for Wounded Knee. There hasn’t been any closure. They won’t revoke the honors. They buried our people naked. What society would do something so disrespectful, burying the dead naked?” She shook her head.
The Curatorial Agreement[10] between the South Dakota State Historical Society and the Wounded Knee Survivors Association called for the society’s “holding the shirt at the Cultural Heritage Center until such time as the Association completes construction of a suitable museum at Wounded Knee or on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.”
“What would it take to build a museum here?” I asked.
“That’s a goal,” LeBeau replied. “We have a preservation office here and I understand they want to build a museum, but they’ve chosen a noisy spot, near the airport. A cultural center was built here, but it ran out of funds before it was all completed, as I understand it, so they didn’t build the museum wing. I feel a museum is very important for youth—to learn about their ancestors, how noble they were. Today our reservation still carries the trauma. We’re learning that traumas are generational; they last for generations and generations. We have our Lakota group, we have our young people joining, but it’s slow. If we could go back to our values and traditions it would be healing.”
“‘Stolen,’ now that’s an interesting word to use,”[11] said James Nason when we met at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Was the Ghost Dance Shirt stolen? The person who wore it was dead, so maybe not. From the perspective of the Lakota, the shirt was stolen. But from the perspective of the army, probably not. In the 1890s, objects taken from battlefields were considered ‘war loot.’ In ancient times—and even recently—that’s how you paid your troops. This was hardly new behavior, in the United States. Cavalry troops not only looted objects but also human remains,” Nason continued. “The War Department requested bodies and skulls; these eventually went to the Smithsonian Institution.”
That’s pretty grisly, I thought, remembering the day about a decade ago when I saw a wall of storage drawers filled with human bones in the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.
After my trip to South Dakota, I had sent James Nason an e-mail requesting an interview, thinking he might have some views on the Ghost Dance Shirt. I was right. Nason, a member of the Comanche tribe, has been in on almost everything connected to Native American material culture: he helped craft the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) and served as a consultant to the National Native American Museum in Washington, DC. Nason introduced me to Megon Noble who coordinates the museum’s NAGPRA repatriation process.
NAGPRA was a revolutionary piece of legislation that permanently changed the power relationship between Native Americans and museums. It compels any institution that receives federal funds to inventory, document, and, if requested, repatriate objects that are covered under the act: funerary and sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony. If a tribe can prove the item is covered under NAGPRA, the museum is obliged to return it. Since most natural history, anthropology/archaeology, and local history museums in the United States store Native American artifacts, there’s been a lot of repatriation in recent years. One of Nason’s greatest achievements has been in helping Native people learn how to care properly for the treasures they get back and create tribal museums for them.
According to James Nason, the reparation debate over the Ghost Dance Shirt garnered so much public attention because of the British Museum’s refusal to return cherished treasures taken during the period of British colonization in Africa, Greece, and other counties. People in Glasgow wanted to show that the Scots were fair and just; that is, different from the English. This was a period during which Scots were agitating for political autonomy.
“When the Kelvingrove’s director, Julian Spaulding, came out strongly against repatriation,” Nason said, “he used the same arguments that the American Association of Museums used against NAGPRA: the Ghost Dance Shirt was in the public domain where it belonged; there are many Ghost Dance Shirts in the United States, this is the only known one in Europe; this was a good faith acquisition by the museum. You know, Spaulding was terminated over this matter.”
If the Kelvingrove Museum were in the United States today, it would have to return the Ghost Dance Shirt because the shirt is considered a funerary object, buried with the dead, and thus covered by NAGPRA. No comparable law existed in Britain (indeed, no comparable law exists there today), so the Kelvingrove was under no obligation to give it back. At the time when the Lakota were trying to repatriate the Ghost Dance Shirt, there were five other requests for repatriation, including a request from Australia for human remains and a request from Benin for bronzes. The City Council hired a consultant to prepare a strategic plan to address all of these requests, and the Lakota request became the test case. Some of the criteria were the same as those that would be applied in NAGPRA: Was the community requesting repatriation an authentic one? Was there clear continuity in the community? Did the object in question have clear-cut cultural or religious importance? Other criteria were different. The City Council was particularly concerned that the Ghost Dance Shirt not be buried, as is the case with many similar funerary items, but preserved for posterity and displayed in a public museum. And the agreement that was finally reached included a hope of future links between the Lakota and Glasgow.
There are more than two hundred tribal museums in the United States; many, though not all, are pretty basic. The Comanche Nation recently purchased an existing museum building next to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. The Agua Caliente Tribe, which owns all of the land in Palm Springs, California, is investing ten million dollars in its museum. These have many of the traits of other museums, except for two: they will not display objects that are sacred to the tribe, and their primary educational mission is directed to their community.
“Ownership is also an issue,” said Nason. “Does the piece belong to an individual? To a group like the Wounded Knee descendants? To the tribe? Disputes around ownership can go on for decades. Whether the Lakota will create a museum depends on the priorities of the tribal council, how much money they have, and whether there are hidden agendas.”
“Here’s my final question,” I said. “There is a big National Park Service site at Little Big Horn. Why isn’t Wounded Knee a National Park Service site?”
Nason shot me a quizzical look. “At Little Big Horn, there were major figures; it was really a big deal involving many Native peoples, and a star-caliber general, General Custer. It was the same Seventh Cavalry. It would be interesting to know who fired the first shot, why the Seventh Cavalry plowed down innocent women and children. Regimental history is a big deal, you know.
“Wounded Knee had no impact on the public psyche of the time. A small numb
er of Indians were killed. The Indians lost. Happened many times.
“Lots of Indian battles grounds are not memorialized. Some are now casinos.”
On my final day in South Dakota, Dan Brosz and I drove three hours from Pierre to Wounded Knee. White clouds rimmed the horizon; it was another hot, dry day. In the car, we talked about the American Indian Movement activists who occupied the area for seventy-one days in 1973. They selected Wounded Knee for its symbolic importance and went there to protest a tribal election and the U.S. government’s failure to fulfill treaty obligations. Because there is only one road to the site, it was relatively easy for the FBI and U.S. marshals to cordon off the area. One marshal and two activists died, and another activist disappeared and was never heard from again. I remembered the television coverage—it was big news. Nothing much happened as a result, though.
Wounded Knee was designated a U.S National Historic Landmark in 1965, but that was not obvious on my visit. There is no pristine National Park Service building or bathrooms or interpretative markers, only a dusty parking lot and a couple of lean-tos shading women selling jewelry. A sign marks the area: “The Wounded Knee battlefield is the site of the last armed conflict between and Sioux Indians and the United States Army.” The text comes directly from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a white man whose research is now largely discredited. The word “battle” is covered by a piece of wood with the word “massacre” written on it.
