Museums in Wisconsin and Alabama plan to return 10 cultural items to Utqiagvik's tribe

Two museums in Wisconsin and Alabama plan to return 10 cultural items to the Native Village of Barrow Inupiat Traditional Government, Utqiagvik's tribal government.

Five items from the Sauk County Historical Society in Baraboo, Wis., may go back on or after Nov. 16. Five from the Birmingham Museum of Art may go back on or after Nov. 30, according to notices the museums published in the Federal Register under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Sauk County's on Oct. 16 and Birmingham's on Oct. 30.

The Sauk County items are a headless doll, classed as an unassociated funerary object, and four objects of cultural patrimony: a wood tool with a bone blade, a bone tool with a steel blade, a piece of ivory with two drilled holes and a horn ladle. Arctic explorer Ernest DeKoven Leffingwell reportedly collected all five while researching the region around Barrow. They were loaned to the society in 1938 and donated in 2025.

Birmingham's items are a harpoon head, a harpoon point, a spear point, a spoon and a miniature walrus ivory totem pole, which museum records describe as "Inupiat or Tlingit or Haida." Axel Rasmussen, a superintendent of schools in Wrangell and later Skagway, collected the harpoon and spear pieces, and the museum bought them in 1956. The museum says all five were collected on unknown dates from unknown locations, possibly in the Arctic and Subarctic.

Another tribe or a lineal descendant can still ask for the items. If competing requests come in, each museum must decide who should get them before anything is returned.

The notices are the latest of several tied to Utqiagvik this year. In June, the Kalamazoo Valley Museum in Michigan tied a comb and a net sinker to the tribe. In July, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland reported remains of at least 29 people collected in 1931, four of them from Point Barrow. And on May 5, the tribe held a ceremony in Utqiagvik for a 5-year-old child returned from the Smithsonian Institution. "After more than a century away, one of our own is finally coming home," its flyer said.

As of mid-September, museums and federal agencies outside Alaska had cleared at least 46 Alaska Native ancestors and 14 belongings to come home.