Hundreds of Northern Arapaho sacred objects returned

After nearly 80 years, Episcopal Church handed over ceremonial headdresses, toys, moccasins.

ETHETE — In the mid-1980s, Merle Haas got a call. Representatives of the Episcopal Church of Wyoming wanted her to meet them in Laramie.

Haas, who is Northern Arapaho, drove to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the seat of church leadership. There, she was led into a dark room, packed with boxes. In the boxes were artifacts — everyday clothes, as well as toys, and sacred objects that Northern Arapaho people had traded a church official for food in the mid-1900s. Haas panicked. She didn’t know what to do, but asked for a few minutes with the collection. As she looked around, touching boxes, she saw two reflections on the wall that looked out of place in the dark room.

Haas investigated. Two picture frames were tucked in the boxes. In one of the frames, there was a picture of someone Haas knew: her grandfather, Chief Yellow Calf, a vaunted Northern Arapaho leader.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Haas said. “I knew it meant something. So I talked to my grandfather and I said, ‘Grandfather, is there something that I’m supposed to do here? Show me. Guide me.’”

Haas spoke with church officials, who told her the artifacts had been accompanied by a letter saying they were for the Arapaho people. She was told that the church needed a letter from the Northern Arapaho Business Council claiming the artifacts — and they’d return them.

Arapaho leaders wrote the letter the next week.

But the Episcopal Church of Wyoming didn’t return the 250 or so artifacts until Monday, 40 years after Haas first learned about them. At a ceremony to commemorate the return, Haas was emotional.

“I’m very happy they’re back now,” she said. “I’m very happy.”

Well over 100 people gathered Monday in Ethete on the Wind River Reservation to hear Haas and other Northern Arapaho elders and leaders speak about the return. Assembled in the circular courtyard of St. Michael’s Mission — known to community members as “The Circle” — tribal members reflected on the objects’ cultural importance, and their connection to the complicated history of the mission and the Episcopal Church’s relationship with the tribe. The mission, established in the early 1900s, had a boarding school where Northern Arapaho kids were educated, and where they were taught to unlearn their traditions.

“The federal government would subsidize missionaries if they go on to reservations, establish missions to Christianize and de-Indianize the Indian,” William C’Hair said, delivering the ceremony’s opening prayer.

Leona Buckman connected the school to Native Americans’ long history of mistreatment by the United States government.

The Northern Arapaho people, Buckman said, come from the Earth. They have had a culture for more than 400,000 years. They believe in the spirit world — that there are seven spirits that guide them through life — and that they were put on Earth to take care of one another, to take care of the Earth and its animals, who are their brothers and sisters.

“But through the years, we’ve been told that, ‘No, that’s not the truth. We want you to believe what we believe,’” Buckman said. “They put us in boarding schools so we learned how to be who they are.”

“They” being European settlers and, later, Americans. One of those boarding schools was at St. Michael’s, and the dorm Buckman was put in when she was in first grade is still standing, albeit abandoned.

“My sister and I, they took us to that building — the first thing they did was cut our hair,” Buckman said. “And they deloused us with kerosene. I can still feel that burn from that kerosene.”

Almost everyone who spoke at the ceremony Monday had an experience to share about “The Circle.” Some relayed harrowing experiences like Buckman’s. Others talked about working to establish a Northern Arapaho museum on the premises to preserve tribal artifacts. High school-age drummers with Young Sky Nation gathered there to hang out when they had nothing to do after school.

Haas, who found her grandfather’s portrait in storage with the artifacts, was shocked when her children asked her to take her grandchildren to the “park.” At first, she thought they meant a park in Lander. But then, she realized they were talking about the playground and basketball court at “The Circle,” which recently had reopened.

“The children were the first ones to bring back this village, this circle, to bring it back alive with their laughter, their happiness,” she said.

From 1938 to 1946, Edith May Adams, an Episcopalian deaconess, ran a small market at the mission where she sold food and household goods. At that time, poverty on the reservation was so severe that tribal members couldn’t afford food, so they would trade Adams ceremonial headdresses, toys, beaded dresses, moccasins, vests, bags and other sacred items or sell them for cash. Adams held onto the items, labeling many with the names of their creators or owners. In 1946, she deeded the collection to the Episcopal Church for safekeeping.

The process of returning it to the tribes didn’t begin to gain traction until 2012, when tribal members creating a cultural room at the Wind River Hotel and Casino were loaned 20 items. That was a “big moment” that connected the tribe to its past, said Jordan Dresser, a former chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council and curator of collections at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery in Colorado.

But church leadership wasn’t ready to return the Northern Arapaho objects to the tribe until Wyoming Bishop Paul-Gordon Chandler was placed on leave in 2023 and ultimately deposed in 2024, said Mary Erickson, associate rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church. “It has always been up to the bishop, and the bishops always said no.”

Without a bishop, the church is being run by a standing committee that established an Equity Task Force. When the question of repatriating the artifacts came up, church members decided to move forward.

“The leadership wasn’t ready, but the people were,” Erickson said. “The people finally got a say. It was that simple. And it was overdue.”

Marian Scott, who turned 80 Sunday, went to school at St. Michael’s and traveled to Casper when boxes with the artifacts were opened.

“I could actually feel those people, who they belonged to, and it was very, very emotional,” she said Monday in Ethete. “And it still is, because they’re here now. They’re back home.”

The Northern Arapaho Tribe has worked under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which only applies to institutions that receive federal funding, to return the remains of Northern Arapaho children who died at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania. The tribe has successfully repatriated remains and sacred objects from the Field Museum in Chicago and institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Wyoming. Officials are working on acquiring other Arapaho items from the Catholic Church.

That raises a critical question, Dresser said. “What happens to these items? What do we do with them?” His answer: a museum, where Indigenous kids can learn about their past and see their history.

“It’s important we have a museum like that, where Arapaho kids and Shoshone kids can come and learn about themselves in safe spaces,” he said. “I think that could change their lives immensely.”

Crystal C’Bearing, director of the Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office, said she’s talking with the diocese about acquiring land near St. Michael’s for a storage facility and cultural center. The goal would be manifold: to loan items out to other museums on the reservation, to rebuild a community center at St. Michael’s and to give tribal members a place to learn that sacred items like the ones returned to the tribe Monday are not only from the past.

“We still have these items, and we still use them. They’re alive. We still use them in our daily lives,” she said. “They’re still here.”

This story was published Oct. 16, 2024.