January 11 2025. Author Jordan Dresser,High Country News.
Tribal objects returned to the Northern Arapaho Tribe.
Around 1 in the afternoon at the peak of the sun, a vehicle procession led by tribal military veterans turned onto the road to St. Michael’s Episcopal Mission and began a slow approach toward a circle of buildings.
I felt a warm grip as Melissa “Millie” Friday locked her hand into mine. Near the end of the line of vehicles, a truck was hauling a white trailer that contained priceless tribal cultural items. I could feel her anticipation, and she could feel mine.
A crowd of over 100 community members, including tribal elders, Wyoming Indian Middle School and High School students stood watching as the procession completed a circle.
The items were finally home.
On that mid-October day last year, the Episcopal Church in Wyoming returned close to 200 cultural items to the Northern Arapaho Tribe. For over 80 years, the church was the steward of the collection, which included rawhide bags, dresses and children’s toys, all made by tribal members during the mid-1900s.
It was a moment I had waited for and prayed about. And so had others.
“This is very historical for us,” said Marion Scott, a tribal elder. In July, Scott accompanied a delegation of tribal members from Our Father’s Church (the Episcopal church on the reservation) and the Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office to the Episcopal Church headquarters in Casper, Wyoming, where the items were stored. Over two days, the group unboxed the objects and carefully took note of each one, doing so with great care and the guidance of elders like Scott. They then prepared the items for the two-hour journey home.
The objects are infinitely more than historical items: “They’re alive,” said Crystal C’bearing, director of the Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office. “We still use them in our daily lives. It’s not from the past, they’re still here.”
The trip home was quick. But the journey to get the sacred items returned was not. During her remarks to the crowd, Friday, who belongs to a committee at Our Father’s House, spoke about how every time the church selected a new bishop, she met with them to express the wishes of the tribal members who gathered at church every Sunday.
“I would say, ‘We want our artifacts back,’” she recalled.
Friday, who has spent her life working with Indigenous youth, has witnessed the difference that culture and tradition can make in a person’s life. For her, sacred items like these are the link, and she has often wondered what it would take to get them back.
“We need to make a change,” she said. “And how are we going to do that? Prayer. We are here today because of prayer. And all praying for the same thing.”
St. Michael’s Episcopal Mission is also a site of prayer, located at the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation, which is home to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Tribes.
During the late 1800s, the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches began establishing churches on the reservation. St. Michael’s Episcopal Mission was started in 1910. Its buildings, which are arranged in a circle, include Our Father’s House and the former site of a post office and a boarding school. East of the circle, next to a playground, stands a building that once served as the St. Michael’s Museum.
The items in question had previously belonged to Edith May Adams, a church deacon who, over the years, amassed a large collection of items that were sold to her by tribal members. In 1946, they were deeded to the church and served as the basis for the collection displayed at the museum. The museum was closed after a flood, however, and the collection was relocated to the church’s headquarters.
I FIRST BECAME familiar with the collection back in 2012, when I was working as public relations officer for the Wind River Hotel and Casino. Together with tribal members Lisa Yawakia and the late Irene Lawson, I was tasked with creating a cultural room that told the story of the Arapaho people.
We had no clue as to what we were doing. None of us had museum experience or the technical expertise to construct an adequate space to display anything. So we reached out to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, and started gathering information about what it would take to make museum-quality cabinets, lighting and room. During the room’s construction, I learned about the Episcopal Church’s collection and its history. These items, I thought, were just what we needed to make our cultural room complete. But getting hold of them proved harder than expected.
The first time we asked, we were told no. Church leaders had issues with the cultural room being attached to the casino and doubted our ability to care for the collection. And yes, it was true that we lacked the technical knowledge or museum expertise. But we did have a lifetime of Arapaho knowledge to draw on.
We refused to give up. We continued to work on the room. We made sure that the lighting was at the correct setting. The cases were custom-made to make sure that they didn’t release gases that would harm the collection. Our collection forms and policies were based on other museums’ practices, and we installed security cameras to guarantee the items’ safety.
Finally, in 2013, the then-bishop of Wyoming, John Sheridan Smylie, held a meeting with us and the tribal members who belonged to Our Father’s House. We told the group what we wanted, and Melissa Friday voiced her support. The elders spoke together in Arapaho and finally announced their own decision: They also wanted the items returned.
The Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming responded with its own proposal, offering to loan us 20 items and renew the loan every year. I was happy, but deep down I still felt dissatisfied. Why were the objects just being loaned to us? After all, these items were ours.
This story was captured and told by Mat Hames in the documentary What Was Ours, which aired on PBS in 2017 and sparked a larger conversation over who owns the material culture of Indigenous communities. It also motivated me to pursue a master’s degree in museum studies at the University of San Francisco. It was there that I learned about the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act, a federal law passed in 1990 that helps tribes reclaim their ancestors and their sacred items from institutions that receive federal funds.
This led me to work for the tribe’s preservation office, where I learned from some of the greats — people like Yufna Soldier Wolf, who embarked on a battle with the U.S. military to reclaim and rebury the children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. In 2017, the Northern Arapaho Tribe became the first to bring our children back from Carlisle, and now tribes across the nation carry on that tradition every year.
As chairman of the tribe in 2020 for two years, I continued to support and assist the preservation office whenever I could. Under the guidance of Crystal C’bearing, the tribe has carried out successful repatriations from the Chicago Field Museum, Harvard University and other major institutions.
Last year, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland helped make significant changes to NAGPRA that will help tribes reclaim their ancestors and sacred items. It has been a long and difficult road. But someone once told me that you give a little of your life to help our ancestors get home. The ancestors themselves choose you for the task.
And it isn’t easy: I have dealt with so many museums that stubbornly insisted that our sacred items were theirs that I have come to accept the long journey it takes to bring them back home. So when I was told early last year that the Episcopal Church was returning the entire collection — and not just loaning it to the tribe — I didn’t believe it. It felt like a dream, too good to be true.
But dreams do come true. And as Millie Friday noted, it all started with a prayer.
“We’re a real prayerful people,” she said. “We’re the Blue Sky people. We pray all the time.”
Once a month, I volunteer with members of the Episcopal Church and tribal members from Our Father’s House. Under the guidance of Eastern Shoshone Tribal Member Roxanne Friday, who was ordained as the first female Native American Episcopal priest in Wyoming, we meet and discuss the future of the collection and St. Michael’s circle. The plan is to revitalize the circle and reopen the museum. It will become a place of healing that acknowledges the hard truths of colonization.
As the afternoon wound down, Roxanne Friday closed the event with a prayer before a meal was served.
“Just stretch your arms,” she said. “Just get some movement going in your body. Take a deep breath. Exhale.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.“This story was originally published by High Country News.” Cover photo Painting of the Fetterman Fight by Kim Douglas Wiggins.