Museum Repatriates Lakota Chief’s Embroidered Leather Shirt

Main Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Mato He Oklogeca)’s leather-based shirt. (Photograph: Wolfgang Günzel/Weltkulturen Museum)

As museums around the world wrestle with repatriating objects taken by means of theft, colonial affect, and cultural looting, essential goods are slowly and gradually generating their way again to where by they belong. Among the these culturally sizeable artifacts is an embroidered leather shirt which after belonged to Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Mato He Oklogeca) of the Teton Lakota. The shirt has been in the collections of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany for in excess of 100 yrs. On June 12, 2021, it was at past returned to the legendary chief’s family.

Main Daniel Hollow Horn Bear was born in 1850, in what was then identified as (by the U.S. Govt) the Nebraska Territory. A veteran of the Struggle of Tiny Bighorn, he expended several decades regularly touring to Washington, D.C. to advocate on behalf of the Lakota individuals. In 1900, the Chief was photographed in the leather-based shirt by John Alvin Anderson. Woven with glass beads and human hair, the shirt is “undoubtedly attributable to the Hollow Horn Bear family members,” according to a museum assertion. The museum even more acknowledges that the “shirt is a culturally certain, identification forming object of spiritual importance to the Teton Lakota Indigenous group.”

How these kinds of an vital cultural item arrived to be in a German museum is—as is typically the case with provenance—rather murky. The shirt arrived to the Weltkulturen Museum as a present from the American Museum of Purely natural Background (AMNH) in 1908. The AMNH on their own received the shirt only two years prior as a gift from American millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes. How Stokes acquired the shirt is not properly identified. As component of a typical investigation into an object’s acquisition and provenance (heritage), the Weltkulturen Museum could not pinpoint illegal acquisition.

Although there are occasionally a lot more legal recourses for demanding repatriation if objects can be established to be taken by pressure or deceit, there are other explanations to return objects taken by means of the much larger context of colonial oppression. In 2019, the excellent-grandson of Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear—Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear—visited the museum. He requested for the return of his ancestor’s shirt. The museum has now granted this ask for, stating they “decided to repatriate the shirt for moral and ethical factors.” Deputy Mayor of Frankfurt Dr. Ina Hartwig stated, “I see the return of the leather-based shirt to Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear as an obligation that outweighs the official authorized situation.”

The return of objects is a point of rigidity for a lot of museums who are reluctant to return their collections to Indigenous populations, even individuals dubiously obtained through conquest and colonialism. The return of Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear’s shirt is even now the exception somewhat than the rule. But, as museums reconsider their collections, they really should heed the words and phrases of Dr. Mona Suhrbier, the American Assortment curator at the Weltkulturen Museum. She commented, “This return is an opportunity for a new starting in the marriage among the Museum and the community of its origin. For the reason that in the present-day discussion on who speaks for whom, a modify of perspective is urgently desired!”

A leather-based shirt of the Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Teton Lakota) has been returned to his descendants after in excess of 100 a long time.

The jacket was in the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum in Germany when its return was requested by its wearer’s good-grandson, Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear.

Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear, pictured in 1900 putting on the shirt which was just lately returned to his relatives. (Picture: John Alvin Anderson/www.firstpeople.us)

h/t: [ART News, Lakota Times]

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