2025 Poster Session

In 2024, changes to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) renewed attention on the urgent need for museums and other institutions that receive federal funding to consult and collaborate with descendant Nations on the care of cultural belongings in museum collections. This presentation shares the story of a unique conservation partnership stretching beyond institutional boundaries to care for familial items returned from a museum to an Ojibwe family.

While researching her great grandmother’s experience at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918) in Pennsylvania, Willow Lawson, a White Earth Band of Ojibwe descendant, discovered a Intent to Repatriate notice published in the Federal Register by the Stearns History Museum in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In 2019, three years after the notice was published, Lawson learned that the museum held approximately 108 items that had belonged to her great-great grandmother Charlotte, also known as Ogabegiizhigookwe (1858-1951).

An Ojibwe artist and member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota, Charlotte spent her life on the White Earth reservation, located just a few hours northwest of the 2025 AIC Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1910s, all of Charlotte’s 11 children attended religious and government schools that aimed to assimilate them into white society.

With the assistance of the White Earth tribal historic preservation officer, Lawson facilitated a visit to the Stearns History Museum in 2021 to allow Charlotte’s last remaining grandchild, Eleanore Robertson, and other family members, to spend time with Charlotte’s belongings. The following year, Eleanore and her daughter, Anita Fineday, requested the return of 35 items. In 2023, with Eleanore suffering from Stage IV lung cancer, the items were repatriated to the White Earth Nation and transferred to the family.

The following year, Lawson’s colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, Samantha Alderson, Assistant Director Conservation, suggested that students in her class at the NYU Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts, could assess a few of the repatriated items for need of conservation care.

After consulting with family members, Lawson entrusted Alderson and four graduate students (Alexa Kline, Caroline Carlsmith, Devon Lee, and Maria Olivia Davalos Stanton) with the conservation of four of Ogabegiizhigookwe’s belongings. Under the guidance of the family, the students performed analysis for the presence of heavy metals, assessed manufacture and condition, cleaned, and stabilized the items before they returned home to Minnesota.

This presentation focuses on the personal impact, the decision-making, and the dynamics of our collaborative work to care for the family’s treasures.