TRIBAL items belonging to Native Americans are to be returned by the Episcopal Church in the United States, 80 years after they were taken in exchange for food and other goods by a deacon.
What the diocese calls its Edith May Adams Collection contains ceremonial headdresses, handmade women’s clothes, toys, and medicine bags, mostly from the Northern Arapaho tribe, but also the Eastern Shoshone. It also contains some sacred items that, tribal elders say, should never have left the tribe.
The items will be returned by the Episcopal Church in Wyoming in a ceremony next week.
Lyle Valdez, a junior warden at Our Father’s House, a congregation of Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation, told the Episcopal News Service: “It’s about time. It’s a long time coming.”
Elders have asked for years for the items to be returned. They were collected by Adams during her work as a deacon running a mission store from 1938 to 1946, when they were traded in return for essentials. Members of the tribe have suggested that, during this Depression-era period, their family had no choice but to trade items in return for food and household goods.
A diocesan page about its collections says that, by the time she left Wyoming, Adams had “accumulated a substantial collection of Northern Arapaho artifacts”. She gave the items to the diocese in 1946, and, when she died, 30 years later, she left “substantial funds” for use by the Bishop of Wyoming.
Some of the items were loaned to Wind River Reservation, but were taken back by the diocese and stored in the basement of diocesan offices.
The Wyoming Standing Committee has been in charge of the diocese since its bishop left in March. Its president, the Revd Megan Nickles, told the ENS that the diocese met tribal leaders and clergy earlier this year to discuss the collection.
She said: “We just came to a recognition that it’s wrong [for the diocese] to have the articles.” Although Adams had had good intentions, “she was there to uphold the church systems and white hegemony.”
In July, tribal elders were invited to visit the diocesan offices and view the items. Some were deemed so sacred that they were allowed to retrieve them immediately, and it was agreed that the rest would be transferred on 14 October.
The Revd Roxanne Friday, the Priest-in-Charge of two Episcopalian congregations on the Wind River Reservation, said that the visit was profound. Ms Friday, who is Easter Shoshone, told ENS that elders began crying when they saw the items.
“The feeling that we got from those items, it was profound,” she said. “There were tears, and there was a very strong feeling that we needed to get these back.”
A ceremony will hand over the collection to tribal leaders and church officials, who will take them to St Michael’s Circle on the diocese’s mission campus in Ethete, where there will “A Coming Home Celebration: Noe’heeckoohut hiisi’” to receive the items. The event will feature an Arapaho honour guard, drummers, singers, and traditional prayer.
The Church has apologised for its treatment of indigenous communities. Evidence of its widespread involvement in the boarding schools at which many Native American children died is still emerging. The Church has launched a fact-finding commission to uncover the extent of its involvement.