Four decades after dozens of culturally significant objects were stolen from the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico, a team of Tribal investigators has pledged to bring the missing items back home. In August 1984, the Santa Ana Pueblo (Tamaya in the Keresan language) was plagued by a 10-month-long string of burglaries. Thieves looted pottery, war shields, clothing, drums, baskets, and rugs from homes in this Native American community situated on the Rio Grande, about 20 miles north of Albuquerque. The Pueblo, generally closed to the public, opens its doors on rare occasions such as feast days, and the first thefts took place shortly after one such event.“This is particularly heartbreaking because these people took ceremonial items actively being used,” Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw), chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs, told Hyperallergic.The robberies continued until a sting operation in May 1985. According to court records obtained by the Associated Press, the architect of the plot was an Albuquerque-based dealer of Native American artifacts who recruited members of a nearby pueblo to infiltrate the historic village. Although the perpetrators were caught, little effort was made to recover the stolen artifacts by the FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the agencies that oversaw the case. (A spokesperson for the FBI Albuquerque Division told Hyperallergic that “attempts to recover stolen items have been made.” Hyperallergic submitted a FOIA request for additional details.)Last fall, however, a team from the Santa Ana Pueblo took it upon themselves to track down the roughly 150 looted objects, working meticulously to return them to their rightful owners, one by one. “Memories of the thefts and the loss of cultural heritage items still weighed heavily on the community,” said Monica Murrell, director of the Santa Ana Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Department. The Pueblo tapped William Woody, a former “top cop” at the Bureau of Land Management, to join the search. Woody’s experience with cases involving the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was key, and “teaming up created a synergy,” Murrell said. “Woody brings a law enforcement angle, we bring technical expertise as preservation specialists.”Santa Ana Investigative Task Force, left to right: Monica Murrell, William Woody, Thomas Armijo, and Jarrett Lujan The task force also includes Pueblo members Jarrett Lujan and Thomas Armijo, grandson of the Pueblo’s governor, Myron Armijo, who told Hyperallergic that their family lost a war shield, ceramics, pottery, and jewelry in the burglaries.Working with the often scant descriptions in case files obtained from the FBI and BIA, the team began scouring auction catalogues, gallery websites, and museum databases for similar objects. “We were looking for anything that suspiciously appeared on the market in the mid-1980s, items with no former provenance,” Murrell said. Notably, pottery made on the Santa Ana Pueblo was not commonly sold to outsiders, so the few examples that make it into the hands of dealers fetch relatively high prices.The team got a big break when they discovered that several of the stolen artifacts were later sold to Larry Frank, a collector and dealer of Native American art. Frank died in 2006, but his son Ross Frank, now a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, agreed to share his father’s ledgers with investigators, yielding invaluable clues to some of the missing objects’ current whereabouts.Their first victory was a bowl that, according to Frank’s records, had been sold to a local gallery. It was illustrated in an old catalogue and matched a case file description of a medium-sized bowl with triangle designs. They were able to track the item to the last gallery to sell it, which then contacted the family who purchased it. That family agreed to return it, and this past May, the bowl was returned to the Santa Ana Pueblo.“We’ve had great cooperation from some of the galleries on getting items back, when you explain the stories. I’ve been quite impressed,” Woody said. A Santa Ana war shield sold in 2021 through the Donald Ellis Gallery (photo by Ross Frank, courtesy Santa Ana Pueblo)Despite some people’s willingness to cooperate, Murrell said that not every source has been as eager to assist in their repatriation efforts. “We have leads on about a dozen pottery vessels with provenance matching this suspicious time period, but no cooperation from auction houses,” she said. She declined to name specific institutions, simply stating that they were “the biggest auction houses in the US.”Next on their list is a buffalo hide war shield that features a central image of horns from which bands of red, yellow, and black radiate out. In March 2021, New York’s Donald Ellis Gallery posted a picture of a shield that the Pueblo said matches a photo of the item from Frank’s ledgers. In an Instagram caption, the gallery stated that the shield came from the Jemez Pueblo, not the Santa Ana Pueblo, and that the work was “acquired by a Canadian private collector.”Ellis did not reply to inquiries from Hyperallergic, but told AP via email that there were no issues raised regarding provenance when his gallery purchased it in 2005. “The shield was acquired in good faith, from a credible and reputable source,” he told them. (At Expo Chicago in 2024, Ellis exhibited several Native American Ledger Books that the Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Tribes also felt should be repatriated.)O’Loughlin of the Association on American Indian Affairs pushed back on Ellis’s claim, saying dealers can’t simply rely on the credibility of their sources to confirm provenance. “Dealers and auction houses in the Southwest are absolutely aware of Santa Ana objects, about how these items move, and also how to obtain good title,” O’Loughlin said. “They know the only way they can do that is by talking to the Native nations from which they come.”The Santa Ana Pueblo’s repatriation effort is significant not only for the time that has elapsed since the items were stolen, but also because it is entirely organized and funded by the Pueblo itself.“What we’re seeing is the inability of the federal government to prioritize recovery of objects until tribes have the wherewithal to put it forward themselves,” Ross Frank told Hyperallergic. “We’re seeing the building of the sovereign power of tribal organizations. That’s the most interesting part of the story.”