Inside the University of Montana’s Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, Donovan Taylor stretched his arms across a wooden conference table holding his phone, which was recording, up to two gray speakers. He furrowed his brow and closed his eyes as he listened to a 1968 recording of a Cheyenne love song.
Next to him, Theresa Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council, leaned closer to the speakers and cupped a hand to her right ear, trying to hear the drums and singers through the lo-fi audio.
After months of consultation with the school, a group of about a dozen Northern Cheyenne elders and cultural leaders traveled from the southeastern Montana reservation to the University of Montana in Missoula last week to review and reclaim ownership of dozens of culturally significant items, recordings and documents in the university’s collections. When such belongings are returned to tribal ownership, Indigenous leaders say, community members regain connection to their identity, ancestors and history.
“They don’t sing like that now,” Taylor, a traditional singer himself, told the group after the song ended. “We’re losing our culture.”
UM has digitized dozens of audio recordings of Cheyenne songs and interviews with elders, which were originally recorded on cassettes or wax cylinders by anthropologists or professors. But the digitizations are imperfect. Some of the recordings sound slow and garbled, like the speakers are underwater. Others make the voices of Northern Cheyenne elders sound high-pitched, like chipmunks.
Taylor asked Wallace Bearchum, chair of the Northern Cheyenne Cultural Commission, to play the Cheyenne love song again. He closed his eyes again as drums filled the room.
“I’m going to try to learn it,” he said. “Bring it back.”
Universities, museums and other institutions nationwide house Native American ancestral remains, cultural artifacts and belongings. Sometimes, the items have been donated. Other times, an employee may have purchased or unethically obtained tribal belongings for research purposes. It’s often unknown how the possessions were originally taken from tribes, whether they were stolen from graves or traded.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990 and commonly known as NAGPRA, establishes processes by which tribes can request the return of belongings and ancestral remains from institutions that house them. But in the more than 30 years since it passed, many institutions remain noncompliant with the law. ProPublica reported in 2023 that about half of the institutionally held remains of 210,000 Native Americans had not been returned. ...
*Pictured above: Northern Cheyenne community members hug after the tribe formally took ownership of cultural items in the University of Montana's collections. Credit: Casandra Evans/University of Montana