The Return of Plundered Belongings Offers a Chance for Healing to a Grieving Lakota Community 170 Years After a Long-Forgotten Massacre

In the conclusion of a long-awaited turn of events, the Great Plains tribe has now reclaimed cherished items stolen from their ancestors by the U.S. Army

By Tim Madigan

On Wednesday morning, on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota, two cousins named Karen and Phil Little Thunder addressed the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council to announce an unprecedented return of dozens of cherished belongings.

It was 170 years since a village led by the Little Thunders’ great-great-grandfather was massacred by the U.S. Army, leaving 86 Lakota dead, many of them women and children. As I wrote in a November 2024 feature story for Smithsonian, the episode, which occurred 35 years before the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, remains little known even today. I also reported how, while the village lay smoldering, Army Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a noncombatant topographer attached to the force, collected dozens of Lakota belongings. Warren soon donated the belongings to the Smithsonian, then barely a decade old, where they remained primarily in storage ever since.

By L. U. Reavis - The life and military services of Gen. William Selby Harney, by L. U. Reavis, page 253. Published in the United States in 1878. File copied from http://digital.denverlibrary.org/u?/p15330coll22,35642, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15269339

Now, after a long and seemingly quixotic quest led by the Little Thunder cousins and several associates, including Paul Soderman, a relative of William S. Harney, the Army brigadier general who orchestrated the massacre, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has returned the Lakota belongings under a policy designed to address unethical museum collecting practices from the past. A few days before the tribal council, Phil Little Thunder told me he planned to announce that “the people are bringing the ancestors’ belongings back to where they left this earth.”

Need to know: What was the Blue Water Massacre?

• The 1855 attack by 600 U.S. Army soldiers was the first against a Lakota village full of families. Authorized by President Franklin Pierce after the killing, the previous year, of Army Lieutenant John Grattan and nearly 30 of his soldiers, it claimed the lives of 86 Lakota, including many women and children, as well as four U.S. troops. Dozens of other Lakota were taken prisoner.
• It was sometimes known as the Battle of Ash Hollow.

The 69 items include moccasins, bows and arrows, buffalo robes, rawhide shirts and leggings, ceremonial pipes, and a handmade child’s doll. They arrived earlier this week at Nebraska’s Ash Hollow State Historical Park, where they will reside in a hilltop building overlooking the valley where the massacre took place. A room has been retrofitted to provide secure storage for the belongings for up to two years while the Lakota decide their ultimate disposition. Only Lakota people will have access to the belongings during that time. “It’s not quite registering, because I’m in disbelief,” Karen Little Thunder told me recently. “I would hope that the people, our people, our tribe, would see this as a gesture not of reconciliation, even an apology. I hope it is a first step toward healing. That’s what I hope people will see it as.”

Suzan Shown Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne nation and an influential advocate for Native Americans who advised the Lakota during the reclamation process, calls it a “momentous, groundbreaking ethical return. Out of the unspeakable arises a blessed way home for all touched by what has happened and what is to come.”

Over the years, the group led by the Little Thunders had been in occasional contact with the Smithsonian, but their efforts were constrained by federal laws that said only human remains, burial artifacts and sacred objects were eligible to be returned by museums to their original owners. That changed in 2022, when the Smithsonian adopted a broader policy called Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns. Under the new directive, objects of everyday life that Native groups deem of cultural importance could also qualify.

Last year, I spoke with Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for museums and culture and a member of the Pawnee nation. “Even if we have legal title for a given artifact, if it was acquired unethically, whether by us or whoever it was that acquired it originally, then we should give it back,” Gover said at the time. “If these artifacts were from a battlefield, even worse from a massacre, clearly they were unethically acquired, not necessarily by us, but by the U.S. Army and given to us. We have an obligation to return them.”

The Little Thunders, who were eventually joined in their effort by tribal elders and elected leaders, officially requested for the belongings to be returned last year. After a formal review, the request was granted this summer, and preparations were made to return the objects in time for the 170th anniversary. The moment carries enormous cultural and spiritual significance for the Lakota, who believe that belongings contain the human essence of their owners. As such, many Lakota descendants believe, the theft at the massacre site interrupted the passage of slain Lakota ancestors into the afterlife. “Someone has to do something to create a gentler departure,” said Harjo. “We have a huge responsibility. This is literally history written in blood. What we want to do is set this right in some way.”

Ione Quigley, a tribal elder and the Rosebud Reservation’s historic preservation officer, told me that almost every family on the reservation—home to some 10,000 people—has a direct lineal tie to the massacre. Quigley hopes to help create a committee of family representatives to decide the future of the belongings. That has been a fraught process on other Lakota reservations where the question of what to do with belongings plundered from the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and returned in 2023 from a small museum in Massachusetts, remains unsettled. Some elders have advocated ritual burning of the belongings, per tradition, while others believe they should be preserved. Ritual burial was ruled out from fear that the items could be plundered.

On the Rosebud Reservation, those discussions are for the future. More immediately, Rosebud tribal members will gather next week, on September 6, at Ash Hollow, three hours south of the reservation, to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre and the return of the items. “I feel the belongings are still connected to their spirits, and we need to honor them this way,” Phil told me. “We’ve never had the chance to heal and mourn over this.”

Quigley said, “There will be ceremonies of healing. Healing both the people that were massacred, healing their spirits, comforting them and letting them go on, and then a healing for us, that we might remember and get strength from it.” She went on, “There is a time of mourning and a time of learning about what actually happened. When the emotions settle down, the people will appreciate that they came home, and that they’re going back to where they should be.”