With German institutions placing a renewed emphasis on the repatriation of various objects in their holdings, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt said this week that it had given the leather shirt of Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear (Mato He Oklogeca), of the Teton Lakota, to his great-grandson Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear. In a press release, the museum cited “moral and ethical reasons” for the return.

The leather shirt was handed over to Duane Hollow Horn Bear on June 12 in Rosebud, South Dakota. Duane Hollow Horn Bear had visited the Weltkulturen Museum in 2019 and submitted a request for the shirt’s return that included a historic portrait photograph, dated to 1900, by John Alvin Anderson. The picture showed Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear, who died in 1913, wearing the shirt. Chief Daniel Hollow Horn Bear was a well-respected leader and politician who advocated for the rights of his people and was often a chief negotiator with the U.S. government.

In 2019, when he requested the shirt’s return, Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear said in a video documenting the repatriation process, “It’s been a hard journey just to come here today. I’m humbled not just to see [his shirt] in a picture, but to hold it in my hand, like I’m holding his hand. . . . Grandpa come home. We need you.”

In a statement, the Weltkulturen Museum said, “The Chief’s shirt is a culturally specific, identity-forming object of religious significance to the Teton Lakota Indigenous community. It bears special patterns of brightly colored glass beads and human hair, which are undoubtedly attributable to the Hollow Horn Bear family and prove personal possession prior to 1906. . . . For Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear and his family, the return of the shirt is like the return of the great-grandfather himself.”

The Weltkulturen Museum came into possession of the shirt in 1908 through an exchange with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For the past 30 years, the shirt had been on permanent loan and display to the German Leather Museum in nearby town of Offenbach.

The AMNH had received the shirt only two years earlier as part of a larger donation by James Graham Phelps Stokes, a New York millionaire and philanthropist whose family’s wealth came from the Phelps-Dodge Company. In its release announcing the shirt’s repatriation, the Weltkulturen Museum said, “The circumstances under which the shirt previously came into the possession of J.G. Phelps could not be reconstructed.”

In a statement, Ina Hartwig, deputy mayor in charge of Culture and Science for the City of Frankfurt am Main, said “Provenance research is one of the great challenges facing museums in the 21st century. The Frankfurt museum landscape has been taking this challenge very seriously for years and is subjecting its collections to a systematic revision. Even if it represents a loss for the collection and the object was legally acquired by the Weltkulturen Museum: I see the return of the leather shirt to Chief Duane Hollow Horn Bear as an obligation that outweighs the formal legal situation.”

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For the first time in nearly 150 years, bison will roam a new corner of a South Dakota national park. It's a vital step in growing the population of America's national mammal.

Badlands National Park officials released four bison into a newly expanded range on Friday. And if the way they careened out of their trailer onto the snow-covered plains is any indication, it seems the bison immediately made themselves at home.

The new real estate came from a land swap with a local ranch that blocked bison from entering the less rugged side of the park. Park officials worked with the US Forest Service and World Wildlife Fund among others to secure the additional 22,000 acres of land in 2014, according to the National Park Foundation.

The project also included new fences along the perimeter of the new land to separate bison from local cattle. Find the best national parks for your favorite outdoor activities

Around 1,200 bison now live in the 244,000-acre park, and their health secures the health of their ecosystem, the foundation said. All that noshing on grassy plains creates the preferred environment for prairie dogs to set up shop, and those populations attract other animals like coyotes and birds of prey that keep the ecosystem in check.

Badlands National Park (Lakota: Makȟóšiča) is an American national park located in southwestern South Dakota. The park protects 242,756 acres (379.3 sq mi; 982.4 km2) of sharply eroded buttes and pinnacles, along with the largest undisturbed mixed grass prairie in the United States. The Stronghold District of Badlands National Park, co-managed by the National Park Service and the Oglala Lakota Tribe.


For 11,000 years, Native Americans have used this area for their hunting grounds. Long before the Lakota were the little-studied paleo-Indians, followed by the Arikara people. Their descendants live today in North Dakota as a part of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Archaeological records combined with oral traditions indicate that these people camped in secluded valleys where fresh water and game were available year-round.

This is the first time bison have touched this land since 1877! #OneSmileEachDay pic.twitter.com/P3DnFlR1H0

— WWF UK (@wwf_uk) April 26, 2020

“I hadn’t had any time to prepare outfits for us but I wanted my 4-year-old son Justus to look really cool," she said

"He had a new pair of slip-on Vans and I suddenly had an idea, looking at the checkerboard design.” After that, she started hand-beading the shoes to make them look like traditional moccasins. “Once they were beaded they had this sort of urban Indian vibe so I braided my son’s hair, put on those shoes and he was the coolest little guy at the pow wow.” she continued, “People were stopping us to take photos, he made such a splash.”

And the shoes didn't just wow others — they gave Charlene's son a chance to "express his tribal identity" and partake in the usual kid antics (like running around), and he was proud to show them off. "It wasn't entirely traditional but a modern adaptation in helping him expressing his culture," she tells Teen Vogue.

After the photos from the festival were posted on social media, Charlene started getting contacted by people wanting her to make them shoes as well, and that’s when it took off. On her website, Charlene shows examples of already-completed custom orders, each with their own unique spin, alongside stunning hand beaded jewelry that's also available for purchase.

Her current pieces stem from Charlene's original work as a Native artist creating dolls and figures with a historic background, in which she used traditional Lakota beadwork.

"I feel that I am continuing the process while establishing a Native unique aesthetic, as well as communicating Native survival and commitment to showing that," she says. "In this case, I expressed it in beading a pair of slip-ons.


There is a historical tradition design that I used specifically for the Vans based off Lakota moccasins."
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Iron Lightning tells her story in a new short documentary called Lakota in America, which shines a light on the Cheyenne River Reservation's youth and those working to help them.

The 15-minute video was produced by Even/Odd Films and commissioned by mobile payments company Square as the latest installment of its "For Every Kind of Dream" series, which first launched at the beginning of the year.

The new film was released to the public on Monday in honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, known in South Dakota as Native American Day.

Lakota in America follows Iron Lightning as she interns at Eagle Butte's only coffee shop through the Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP), a grassroots organization that helps lead young people toward a more secure future.

"The internships help you prepare for life after high school," she says in the film. "I am definitely going to go to college, and I will come back and help my community in any way I can. Because it's a struggle here. But it's my home."

She describes how Eagle Butte's houses are in disarray, trash fills the yards, "broken and busted cars" sit in the driveways.

Parents don't really take care of their kids unless they have a job and a sense of economic stability.


South Dakota is one of four states that recognizes Native American Day statewide. Burke says Square felt it was meaningful to release the film on a day that celebrates and promotes Native American culture, while commemorating the history of the Indigenous people of North America.
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Jan 7, 2017: Henry Red Cloud knelt down on the snow-packed ground at the Standing Rock Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

 He didn’t seem to mind the frigid cold as he used his bare hands to secure an outlet to a solar air heater, one of 11 he installed one December day at the Oceti Sakowin Camp to help protectors there stay warm as temperatures dipped below zero.

“They’re outside all day,” Red Cloud, 57, later told ABC News in an interview. “And we still have 120 days of winter left here in the Northern Plains.”

Many have left since the Army’s announcement, but hundreds still remain and have erected teepees, tents and other kinds of shelters to keep warm this winter atop the frozen, snow-covered ground.

ABC News photographed Red Cloud’s fifth return visit to the camp where he continued installing various systems providing heat, light and electricity from renewable energy sources, including solar and wind. The founder and owner of Lakota Solar Enterprises, a Native American-owned and operated renewable energy firm in South Dakota, also trained hundreds of protesters on how to install the systems themselves so they can live sustainably and embrace green technology.

“We need to utilize the sun and start coexisting with the earth and the sun and the wind,” he said. “We can do it. Our ancestors did it.”


Red Cloud, a member of the Oglala Lakota Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, said he took an interest in renewable energy in hopes of helping Native American communities like his own that are suffering from high unemployment, poverty and the effects of climate change.


On the vast Pine Ridge Reservation, which spans over 2 million acres, Red Cloud and his partners are also building sustainable homes using natural materials, planting thousands of trees to combat deforestation and are cultivating organic farms with alternative energy sources.


Now, the father of 17 and direct descendant of Lakota war chief Red Cloud is bringing these green concepts to the Standing Rock Reservation to empower the tribes fighting the pipeline.


“We’re going to make history together and start to move ourselves away from fossil fuels. It can’t happen overnight,” he told ABC News. “We need to move forward together.”
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A tribal leader Wednesday said he contacted the White House and met with North Dakota's senators in an effort to halt construction of a $3.8 billion, four-state oil pipeline that crosses the Missouri River near an American Indian reservation in southern North Dakota.

Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman David Archambault II, in a teleconference with reporters, stressed that the he and the tribe are working to ensure peace among those protesting the Dakota Access pipeline.

"There is no place for threats, violence or criminal activity," Archambault said.

North Dakota transportation officials, meanwhile, closed a several-mile stretch of Highway 1806 on Wednesday because of the protest along the road.

The 1,172-mile pipeline planned by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners is passing through the Dakotas and Iowa on its way to Illinois. Construction crews with armed private security guards arrived last week just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers, where native Americans have been staging a protest for months at a "spirit camp."

Archambault and more than two dozen others have been arrested in the past week for interfering with construction of the project.


On Monday, developers of the project sued in federal court to stop protesters — including Archambault — from interfering with the project, alleging the safety of workers and law enforcement is at risk.

U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland granted the developer's motion for a temporary restraining order Tuesday.

Archambault said he met Wednesday with North Dakota Sens. John Hoeven and Heidi Heitkamp to "express concerns" about the pipeline.


The tribe sued federal regulators late last month for approving the pipeline. The tribe argues the pipeline would disturb sacred sites and affect drinking water for the thousands of residents on the reservation and the millions who rely on it downstream.

Archambault told reporters he also has urged President Barack Obama to step in. The president and First Lady Michelle Obama traveled to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2014 to get a firsthand look at the impoverished living conditions on the reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.


Archambault said he asked nothing of the president then but is doing so now.

"I believe both he and Michelle Obama were touched," Archambault said. "So now if there's any way he can intervene and move this pipeline off our treaty lands, I'm asking him."

The White House did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
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