The beaten-up suitcase had been in the Newell family for more than a century, passed from dusty closet to dusty closet and pulled out every now and then for guests.
They would unlatch the metal clasps and take out a fringed shirt adorned with careful beadwork, a weathered pair of moccasins and an elaborate headdress that trailed eagle feathers down to the floor.
Passed along with the suitcase was the story told by their 19th-century ancestor, Major Cicero Newell, who said he had received the clothing from the well-known Lakota leader, Chief Spotted Tail, during his stint as an agent for the federal government’s Indian affairs office beginning in the late 1870s in what is now South Dakota.
The suitcase had been passed down five generations, ending up in the guest room closet of Newell’s great-great-grandson, James, a retired salesman living in a small town in Washington State.
But when it came time for James Newell to think about passing it along again, the sixth generation had a different idea.
“‘Well, Dad, why don’t we try giving it back?’” James Newell, 77, recalled his son, Eric, asking when the topic came up several years ago at the dinner table.
The older Newell thought about it. There was the issue of whom they would give it back to, but that could be worked out.
“It felt right,” James Newell said.
The Newells’s suitcase is part of an untold number of Native artifacts kept in attics and closets across America, their origin stories often clouded by decades-long games of intergenerational telephone.
A 1990 federal law set up a protocol for museums and other institutions to repatriate Native human remains, funerary objects and other cultural items in consultation with tribes and descendants. But that law doesn’t cover the artifacts found in your grandfather’s basement or your aunt’s cupboard.
As younger generations inherit these possessions, they’re more likely to have an impulse toward giving them back, repatriation experts say. Some are motivated by a sense of ethical responsibility, some by practical considerations, and some because they have less interest in the “cabinet of curiosities” traditions of earlier times.
“Priority No. 1 was to get it into the hands of somebody who is going to take care of it and maintain it,” said Eric Newell, 46, who noted that it had been his “great-great-great-grandfather” who had the original connection to it.
So his father started doing research on the old suitcase in the closet, starting with the man who had asked that it be passed down to the firstborn son of each generation. (It had gone to James Newell, a second son, because his older brother had been wary of keeping the heirlooms in his trailer in the mountains, where he had worked as a logger.)
As with many family stories, the exact circumstances of how Cicero Newell came into possession of the heirlooms are somewhat ambiguous, so the Newells relied on what they had been told by previous generations and what they could find online.
A Civil War veteran from Michigan, Cicero Newell was appointed what was then termed a U.S. Indian agent — an employee tasked with communicating between the federal government and tribes. He was stationed in what is now reservation land of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
It was a tumultuous time in the region: The U.S. government had recently seized the Black Hills, flouting the treaty that had promised tribes control over the vast Great Sioux Reservation.
Newell, who later wrote extensively about his time on the reservation, described how he came to admire the Lakota leaders he met. His tenure at times drew criticism; some newspaper accounts accused him of acting as a pawn for Lakota officials such as Chief Spotted Tail. One article criticized him in harsh personal terms for helping spread the word about a Sun Dance ceremony put on by the chief.
In his writings, Newell expressed a particular affection for Chief Spotted Tail, a storied tribal spokesman and negotiator who was shot and killed in 1881 by a member of his tribe. Newell wrote that when he passed on to the afterlife, “I hope that one of the first persons I may meet there will be my dear old friend Spotted Tail.”
What, exactly, Chief Spotted Tail thought of Newell is less clear from the historical record. Newell wrote that during his time as a U.S. Indian agent, he had successfully convinced Spotted Tail and other Lakota parents to send their children to a new federal boarding school out east.
In recent years, research into Native American boarding schools has more fully revealed the neglect and abuse that many children endured in them, as well as their targeted efforts to erase Indigenous students’ cultures to achieve assimilation.
In 1880, the year before he died, Chief Spotted Tail traveled to the school in Carlisle, Pa. Newspaper articles from around that time and letters kept in government archives indicate that he had been unhappy with the school’s approach to punishment and grew distraught over the sickness and deaths of schoolchildren.
For James Newell, an idea of what to do with the suitcase began to take shape in 2020.
Newell, who had been researching for more than a year, was looking on the website of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe when he came upon a familiar name: John Spotted Tail, chief of staff to the tribal president. He reached him over the phone and told him what was inside his family’s closet.
“At first I kind of thought it was a crank call,” John Spotted Tail, 69, recalled.
But as he listened to Newell’s story — after explaining to him that he was five generations removed from Chief Spotted Tail — he began to grow interested.
Newell was eager to give the contents of the suitcase to a descendant of the Lakota chief but wary of driving it across the country. Federal law prohibits the possession of eagle feathers without special dispensation, but the government allows exceptions for Native Americans because of their religious and cultural significance. Newell was worried that if he were to be stopped on the road, his possession of the headdress could land him in jail.
John Spotted Tail’s curiosity was piqued by Newell’s story. When he came home from work, he asked his wife if they had enough money to travel to Washington.
They got in the car the next morning, supplied with lunch meat and bread, and began a 1,400-mile drive to the home of a complete stranger.
“We’re halfway there and I look at John and I said, ‘What if these people aren’t real?” said Spotted Tail’s wife, Tamara Stands and Looks Back-Spotted Tail.
But as soon as the couple arrived in La Center, Wash., the Newells opened the suitcase for them. In addition to the clothing, it contained a bison horn and braided hair that could have belonged to a horse or a person.
“We looked at each other and we said, ‘Is this real? 144 years?’” she said. “We were just kind of in awe.”
After spending three days with the Newells, the Spotted Tails drove back to the Rosebud Reservation with the suitcase in the trunk of their Volkswagen Passat.
There was a tribal protocol they needed to follow to determine where the belongings would end up. They consulted Lakota spiritual leaders and cultural experts, participated in a ceremony surrounding the clothing and consulted other Spotted Tail relatives.
Some were skeptical about the story from the Newells; others wanted to see the items kept with the family. John Spotted Tail favored putting it in a museum, where visitors could learn about the Lakota leader.
For several years, he kept the suitcase in his home, but the responsibility began to weigh on him. “It was hard to even leave home or go anywhere because they were here,” John Spotted Tail said.
He and his wife called the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre, where curators wanted to feature the century-and-a-half old heirlooms prominently and assured them that they would be well preserved. And the museum was less than a two-hour drive from the reservation, making it accessible to local relatives who wanted to visit.
The suitcase, and the story of how it got here, was a historical society director’s dream.
The museum’s leader, Ben Jones, looked through old photographs and read Newell’s writings to try to find evidence indicating that the Lakota chief had given the one-time Indian agent such a significant gift.
None surfaced, but it was clear that the two men had crossed paths, living in the same area for a couple of years and navigating the conflict around the U.S. government’s westward expansion.
In May, the Spotted Tails formally transferred the suitcase and its contents to the historical society at a ceremony involving Lakota prayers at a middle school in Pierre. The museum is hoping to put the heirlooms on display late next year.
“They became colleagues, and then friends,” Jones said of Newell and Chief Spotted Tail, “and five generations later, their families were wondering what to do with these artifacts.”
The post After Five Generations, a Family Gave Back the Treasures in its Closet appeared first on New York Times.
