Pawnee veteran seeks return of ancestor's remains and regalia

Wednesday, August 28, 2019  

PAWNEE, OK— Much of the Pawnee world was in turmoil back in the 1870’s. Disease and hardship had reduced a once mighty warrior tribe to a fraction of its former numbers, and what parts of eastern Nebraska they still held, they would not hold for long.

White Fox was a young man, and would have been a celebrated warrior just a generation before, but now, like many warriors who had once led the twice yearly buffalo hunts, or raided far and wide for horses and women, he was surrounded by an alien culture, which made strange requests, requests which he welcomed, given the poverty and despair about him.

Slipping out unnoticed, White Fox accompanied two other Pawnee, White Eagle and Red Fox, on a long boat ride across the North Atlantic, where they landed in Europe, touring with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.

White Fox may have left the abject living conditions in Nebraska far behind, but there was nowhere in Europe where he could hide from disease. While performing in Gothenburg, Sweden, he soon contracted tuberculosis, and died in 1874, at the age of 28.

“What they did then,” said Roy Taylor, an enrolled member of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and the eldest living descendant of White Fox, “was they beheaded this poor man, stripped his skin off of him and made a plaster cast, made it the center piece of a traveling show, charged admission.”

Taylor wants his ancestor’s remains and regalia returned.

In 2014, the Nebraska Historical Society wrote a long story on the history of White Fox, but they did not speak with Roy Taylor, did not talk to any Pawnee, and ended the article asserting all that could be done, had been done. Some say the skin of White Fox was sent home, perhaps buried in a cemetery in Oklahoma, because there is a white cross in that cemetery with his name on it.

Taylor decided to take legal steps, and he contacted a Chicago law firm, who took on his case pro bono in April, 2018: Roy Taylor, a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, plaintiff, versus Kingdom of Sweden and the National Museum of World Culture, a government agency under the Swedish Ministry of Culture.

“I am an 85 years old,” Taylor said. “I do get around okay. I went all the way to the 11th Grade at Haskell Institute. I did so well in high school, they said, Roy, you don’t have to come back for the 12th Grade, please don’t come back. I got caught a couple times drinking beer and so I had to move on, unwillingly. At that time, the Korean War was really on, and so I joined the Marine Corps and I served honorably, and I’m a combat veteran, with the 1st Marine Division, I was only 17, just a young boy, raised by my mother and enrolled at Pawnee in Oklahoma, and I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to be in Pawnee, but its just a typical Indian town in Indian country. I did retire after many years with the BIA. I was a senior contracting officer under the US Government assigned to the BIA. I was in Albuquerque, I was in Washington, and here in Oklahoma. I did well with the Bureau. I got in on Indian preference so they waived the higher requirements for me, and they gave me credit for the Marine Corps, and I had enough federal employment time, including the Marine Corps so that I retired, and I have not worked for nearly 20 years now but I had a good life in the bureau. I went all over the US administering grants and contracts for education, for training, for anything the US government was funding and the tribes were determined to be eligible for. I have had a very eventful and profitable life…and I always felt grateful that I was able to get into federal service as a contracting officer at that level without ever having finished high school.”

The complaint, filed at the District Court in Washington, DC, is a civil action, calling for “…replevin and the repatriation and return of his ancestor’s regalia and other personal belongings, now wrongfully in possession of the National Museum of World Culture (NMWC)…”

Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today