On Wednesday morning, on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota, two cousins named Karen and Phil Little Thunder addressed the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council to announce an unprecedented return of dozens of cherished belongings.

It was 170 years since a village led by the Little Thunders’ great-great-grandfather was massacred by the U.S. Army, leaving 86 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.”

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