The Guardian reports
Ponca chief Standing Bear’s tomahawk is currently at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
A descendant of a Native American chief and civil rights leader urges Harvard University to repatriate an ancestral heirloom. Ponca chief Standing Bear’s tomahawk – a single-handed axe, is currently displayed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
“This is a morality and justice issue,” Brett Chapman, an attorney in Oklahoma with Ponca, Pawnee and Kiowa heritage, says. Chapman’s maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Chief White Eagle, and Standing Bear shared a common grandparent.
On 29 April, the attorney sent a letter to Jane Pickering, the director of the museum where the tomahawk is displayed. In the letter, Chapman laid out challenges to Harvard’s moral right to possess the relic.
Full report at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/07/harvard-ponca-chief-standing-bear-tomahawk-lawyer
