Trump’s Anti-Woke Crackdown Hasn’t Stopped the Smithsonian from Righting This Historic Wrong

Somebody out there is righting a historic wrong and doing the decent thing. From Smithsonian:

It was 170 years since a village led by the Little Thunders’ great-great-grandfather was massacred by the U.S. Army, leaving eighty-six Lakota dead, many of them women and children. As I wrote in a November 2024 feature story for Smithsonian, the episode, which occurred 35 years before the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, remains little known even today. I also reported how, while the village lay smoldering, Army Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a noncombatant topographer attached to the force, collected dozens of Lakota belongings. Warren soon donated the belongings to the Smithsonian, then barely a decade old, where they remained primarily in storage ever since.

Now, after a long and seemingly quixotic quest led by the Little Thunder cousins and several associates, including Paul Soderman, a relative of William S. Harney, the Army brigadier general who orchestrated the massacre, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has returned the Lakota belongings under a policy designed to address unethical museum collecting practices from the past. A few days before the tribal council, Phil Little Thunder told me he planned to announce that “the people are bringing the ancestors’ belongings back to where they left this earth.”

Civil War buffs will recognize Warren as the guy who later, at Gettysburg in 1863, noticed that Little Round Top was undefended and hustled Union units, including Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's 20th Maine Infantry, to its summit.

The relics Warren looted came from an obscure atrocity in this country's genocidal campaign against its native populations. In a reprisal for an attack on U.S. soldiers, the army slaughtered eighty-six Lakota, very much including women and children in what became known, among white people anyway, as the Battle of Ash Hollow. Warren came along and looted the dead and shipped his booty off to the Smithsonian.

The Little Thunders, who were eventually joined in their effort by tribal elders and elected leaders, officially requested for the belongings to be returned last year. After a formal review, the request was granted this summer, and preparations were made to return the objects in time for the 170th anniversary. The moment carries enormous cultural and spiritual significance for the Lakota, who believe that belongings contain the human essence of their owners. As such, many Lakota descendants believe, the theft at the massacre site interrupted the passage of slain Lakota ancestors into the afterlife. “Someone has to do something to create a gentler departure,” said Harjo. “We have a huge responsibility. This is literally history written in blood. What we want to do is set this right in some way.”

Ione Quigley, a tribal elder and the Rosebud Reservation’s historic preservation officer, told me that almost every family on the reservation—home to some 10,000 people—has a direct lineal tie to the massacre. Quigley hopes to help create a committee of family representatives to decide the future of the belongings.

I think the ultimate resolution on the relics should belong to the Lakota people alone. It is their dead to honor. I just hope they scoot the material out of Washington before Stephen Miller's lizard brain starts to quiver. Somewhere in the government, someone is doing something humane. This cannot stand.