Speed Art Museum Repatriates Objects to Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes

On August 19, 2026, officials from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY helped Chester Whiteman and Fred Mosqueda, representatives of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, carefully load sacred objects into their cars for the drive back to Oklahoma. The 24 items had been held by the Museum for nearly 100 years. They were finally returning to their rightful owners.

This marked the Speed museum’s first return of sacred and cultural belongings to Native communities under the federal law known as NAGPRA – Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA is a federal law requiring museums and other institutions to review certain Native American human remains, sacred objects, and cultural belongings in their collections and work with Tribal communities toward their return.

The Speed’s first repatriation is about more than returning items. It is also about restoring relationships, respecting the importance of these belongings, and supporting healing within the communities to which they belong.

Sirene Martin, the Speed’s Assistant Curator and NAGPRA Coordinator, began researching the Museum’s modest collection of Native American artworks for potentially NAGPRA-sensitive items in 2023. She contacted Whiteman and Mosqueda informing them of what she found.

“They came for a site visit in 2024 and spent about eight hours with us – the whole day – and we went over close to 100 objects in review; we settled on 24 of those items that were good candidates for repatriation,” Martin said.

Installation view of Native American art galleries at Speed Art Museum. Photo by Mindy Best.

This was unusual.

Typically, it’s tribal representatives reaching out to institutions to begin the process of repatriation, not the other way around. While NAGPRA is federal law and does require institutions holding Native items to assess their possessions for possible repatriation, the law is not robustly enforced. Nor is following it always a priority for institutions. Nor do institutions commonly dedicate the resources and personnel needed to follow the law.

“I have not come across any corresponding positions like mine at other museums that do not have large Native American collections,” Martin said. “I assume that work is falling on their collections manager or the registrar. I have found counterparts with museums that are connected to universities, but in terms of museums like the Speed – and not to say that there aren't any – I have not met anybody yet.”

Nor have I. In my writing, which focuses heavily on art museums across the United States and Native American art, I do not recall another situation in which a museum proactively contacted tribal members to begin the NAGPRA repatriation process. Surely it has happened before, but it is atypical.

In this case, the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes were not aware the Louisville museum even had this material. That’s not uncommon.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s following the Indian Wars across the Great Plains, Native Americans were at a low point. Forced relocation had deposited them in Indian Territory – present day Oklahoma. They were desperately poor and hungry. Bison had been hunted near to extinction. They were dispossessed of their ancestral homelands and lifestyles. They were struggling to survive on reservations. Struggling to understand the white man’s law. Rapacious settler colonials were taking more and more, offering less and less.

Into this genocide came collectors and relic hunters and tomb raiders and museum and university people from “back east.” It was a gold rush. They were driven by greed, by curiosity, by an interest in “capture before extinction” anthropology and ethnography, trying to gather up what they could of Indigenous culture before the people – and the stuff – was gone forever.

That was the contemporary thinking.

Native American artwork and artifacts and cultural patrimony – and human remains – were stolen, dug up, and at best sold for pennies or traded for a day’s rations under great distress. Artwork, no matter how beautiful, can’t be eaten; when people are hungry, they’ll sell what they’ve made to fill their stomach, and the stomachs of their children.

Cultural objects numbering into the hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – taken from the Plains under these circumstances ended up in personal and institutional collections around the world. They were stored in trunks and cabinets. Placed in basements. Deep in storage vaults. Forgotten about.

The Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho items in the Speed’s collection were acquired in the 1930s. No detailed catalogue or inventory of their acquisition or description was made.

This was commonplace.

Installation view of Native American art galleries at Speed Art Museum. Photo by Mindy Best. II

Sacred Items Returned

Tribal representatives performed a cleansing ceremony at the Speed after reclaiming their items. Now, three years after beginning the repatriation process, the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho objects have finally returned to the hands of the people who created them. That seems like a long time. In these matters, it’s not.

“There were internal protocols that had to be built because this was our first time repatriating. We had to adhere to internal processes to make sure that we were doing everything correctly on our end in terms of deaccessioning those objects,” Martin explained. “This was my first time, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing right by the Tribes, but also doing right by the Museum and that I was engaging in the law correctly.”

Martin’s NAGPRA work began as part of the Museum’s broader efforts to do better by its Native American artwork and community members. The most visible result of this was newly expanded and reimagined galleries of Native American art opened in April of 2024. The presentation was modernized to put greater emphasis on celebrating living artistic practice and presence; the Native galleries were also moved to a more prominent physical position within the Museum.

Due to the sacred nature of the returning Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho items, they were not photographed for accompanying media coverage. Nor were they detailed to the public. Martin does highlight one of the objects, a Cheyenne cradleboard she referred to as a “crowd favorite” at the Speed.

“Attached to the cradleboard was a sacred turtle amulet,” she explained. “I am understanding the cradleboard as an object of cultural patrimony. My understanding of cradleboards is they were created to be in perpetual use by expecting mothers of the community, that could be a misreading, but that is what I have learned thus far. The inclusion of the turtle amulet takes it a step further into the realm of being a sacred object. The turtle amulet would have historically held a child's umbilical cord. We do not believe that ours has any human remains incorporated into the amulet, but because of the nature of the object, myself and our tribal representatives thought that would be a great candidate for repatriation.”

Martin’s repatriation outreach continues with her contacting other tribes about other objects held at the Speed. She hopes to repeat what has been achieved with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho.

“It has definitely been a project full of passion and emotion for me, and I am so glad that we are at this moment where a cycle can be closed and another one can open, and hopefully we will have a better working and healthier relationship with Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho going forward because of this,” she said.