The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, has surrendered 24 objects from its collection to their Native American communities of origin, the US Department of the Interior announced in May.
The items in question are considered “sacred objects” or “objects of cultural patrimony,” according to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). According to the notice, the official handover of the objects, which belong to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes based in Oklahoma, is scheduled for this summer, on or after June 11.
As reported in the Courier Journal, this is the first time the Speed has returned items to Indigenous tribes via NAGPRA. Sirene Martin, assistant curator and repatriation coordinator at the Speed Art Museum, told the paper that the museum first connected with the tribes in 2023 and that representatives visited the Speed the following year.
NAGPRA, a federal law passed by Congress in 1990, ensures that Native American remains and cultural artifacts in museum collections are returned to their descendants and tribes. Last month, New York’s American Museum of Natural History returned 2,700 hair clippings—originally collected for display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and held in the collection of the museum ever since—in compliance with NAGPRA.
As for the Speed, the museum returned three ceremonial objects (a rattle, a beaded pipe bag, and a beaded turtle amulet) and 21 other items, among them beaded pouches and bags, moccasins, a coup stick, a cradleboard, and a lance. “We acknowledge that they come to us through conflicted circumstances and deserve to be in the right context within the rightful communities,” Martin told The Courier Journal.
Most of the items have been in the Speed’s collection since Fredrick Weygold, a Louisville-based artist and ethnographer, donated them in 1930. Weygold, who died in 1941, collected Native American art and artifacts, taught himself the Lakota language, and advised European museums on Native American art. Paintings, drawings, and photographs by Weygold were on view in an exhibition at the Speed in 2017.
The Speed is hosting a talk tonight to acknowledge the repatriation. Chester Whiteman and Fred Mosqueda, tribal representatives of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, will be in conversation with Martin and Erika Holmquist-Wall, Speed curator of European and American paintings and sculptures.
