Speed Art Museum repatriation efforts will return two dozen cultural treasures to Native American communities tonight, August 19, following a ceremony at the Louisville institution. The museum’s first action under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, involves artifacts linked to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, including beaded bags, a turtle amulet, and a cradle board.
In 2023, museum curators began working with tribal representatives to identify items in the collection subject to return under NAGPRA. The law requires that objects affiliated with a particular tribe or Native Hawaiian organization be repatriated upon request by an authorized representative or descendant.
NAGPRA repatriation efforts and collaboration
During a site visit the following year, the group determined that 24 of nearly 100 potential objects met the criteria for return, according to museum officials.
“Family members can now come back and say, ‘wow, my great grandpa made this,’” said Arapaho Tribe representative Fred Mosqueda, who lives in Oklahoma. “These items are sacred.”
Among the objects is a sundance rattle, a ceremonial instrument used in rituals across North America and traditionally made with animal leather, bird feathers, and claws to echo the sound of a buffalo herd. Another is a Cheyenne cradle board, typically crafted by a community of women and passed forward for the tribe’s next expecting mother.
Assistant Curator and NAGPRA coordinator Sirene Martin said the items entered the museum in 1930 as a gift from German American photographer Frederick Weygold.
NAGPRA regulations were updated in 2024, expanding tribal authority in the process and compelling museums to refresh inventories of Native objects. Southern Cheyenne representative Chester Whiteman said that before the changes, some institutions limited access, adding that museums “would only let us see what they wanted us to see.”
Following 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 the institution still holds thousands of human remains. Later that year, the National Park Service announced $3 million in grants to support repatriation work nationwide.
“So much of the repatriation is invisible to the public,” Martin said. “This asks us to bring the human back to the humanities.”
The development comes during a difficult period for the Speed, which dissolved its education department and laid off nine employees last October due to financial pressures.
Chief curator Erika Holmquist-Wall is scheduled to moderate a panel on NAGPRA and the repatriation process this evening with Mosqueda, Whiteman, and Martin. After the discussion and a recessional ceremony, Mosqueda and Whiteman plan to load the sacred objects into a vehicle and begin the drive to return them to their communities in Oklahoma.
The representatives said the items will be kept in their offices until a dedicated storage space is secured.
“All these articles should be in Native hands,” Whiteman said. “They weren’t made to be put on display. They weren’t made to make money off of. They belong to somebody.”