Five people have been indicted for stealing Indian artifacts from the Missouri River.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in South Dakota said the five people traded in a "significant number" of artifacts like arm bands, bracelets, beads and pottery. Federal law makes it a crime to remove items from federal or Indian land and to knowingly buy them.

"It's the money they want," Halley Maynard, a tribal cultural preservation monitoring enforcement officer for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, told The Dickinson Press.

Richard Harnois, a senior field archaeologist with the Army Corps of Engineers, said the Missouri River is prone to theft due to erosion. "It's just one huge artifact mine for some of these folks," he said.

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5 indicted for American Indian artifact looting (The Dickinson Press 1/25)