HCN: Auction house pulls shirt after Rosebud family complains

Two weeks ago, a Lakota sacred object advertised as a "Sioux Beaded and Quilled hide Shirt" was set to be auctioned off in Boston, Mass. and was expected to fetch $150,000-250,000. Minutes before the bidding began on Nov. 9, Skinner auction house pulled the item in response to pressure from attorneys and tribal officials representing a family on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota who said the shirt belonged to their ancestor, Little Thunder.

“I cried when I found out they had stopped the auction,” said Karen Little Thunder, the soft-spoken great-great-granddaughter of the Lakota leader. Though greatly relieved, she is left with unsettling questions. “What if it was taken from my grandfather’s grave?”

But the collector who consigned the item, identified as “Derby” in the catalog listing, said that he had “good title” to the shirt, proving he had acquired it legally. Reached by phone, Skinner director Douglas Diehl would not discuss the matter but released a statement through the auction house’s PR company saying Skinner “is committed to the highest standards of research and due diligence for all items offered at auction and is particularly sensitive to Native American artifacts.” It decided to pull the item, according to the statement, because a recently discovered photograph that shows a man identified as Little Thunder wearing the shirt surfaced, and Skinner was not able to disprove its legitimacy.

Trade in Indian artifacts is as old as European settlement in North America. It’s often called “pot hunting” in the Southwest, where vividly decorated ancient Anasazi pottery can fetch into the hundreds of thousands. These activities still go on today, though they’re mostly illegal now. Rampant grave looting led to a series of laws passed in 1906, 1966, 1979 and 1992 that forbid the taking of Native American artifacts from federal land.