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BOSTON (AP) — A tomahawk after owned by Chief Standing Bear, a revolutionary Native American civil rights leader, has been returned to his tribe just after getting housed for a long time in a museum at Harvard University.
Users of the Ponca tribes in Nebraska and Oklahoma frequented the Massachusetts university on June 3 for the ceremonial return of the artifact, the tribes stated in a latest announcement.
Standing Bear had originally gifted the pipe-tomahawk to one particular of his attorneys after successful the 1879 court situation that built him a single of the to start with Indigenous Americans granted civil legal rights.
The tomahawk modified fingers numerous occasions just before being acquired by Harvard in 1982.
“This is a very good homecoming and a great stage in the numerous measures we have to do to get back to our id, to our methods of our persons,” Angie Starkel, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska who produced the vacation to Cambridge, stated in a statement.
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 never converse about generational therapeutic, and that’s what we’re doing now,” she mentioned in a assertion. “This is healing.”
Jane Pickering, director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, reported the tomahawk’s return displays the institution’s drive to fix past harms.
“The Peabody right benefited from collecting methods that we accept today ignored the needs and values of family members and communities,” she explained in a statement.
Harvard and the museum have confronted criticism above the rate of repatriating Indigenous American remains and other important objects to tribes, as expected less than federal regulation.
The museum and tribes have been doing work on the tomahawk’s return for additional than a yr tribal customers ended up slated to travel to campus just before pandemic-related limits very last 12 months delayed it.
The Ponca tribes say they will announce options to exhibit the tomahawk at a later day.
They were being amid quite a few forcibly relocated from their homelands to other territories by the federal govt in the 1800s.
Standing Bear was arrested 1878 for leaving the tribe’s Oklahoma reservation in get to satisfy a guarantee he made to bury his eldest son back again in their tribe’s homeland in Nebraska’s Niobrara River Valley.
In his landmark federal demo, he effectively argued for the recognition of Indigenous Americans as people entitled to legal rights and safety below legislation.
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