Pittsburgh museum plans to return Tlingit Raven Hat to Tlingit & Haida as soon as Nov. 23

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh plans to return a Raven Hat, Yéil S'áaxw, to the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes on or after Nov. 23, according to a National Park Service notice published in the Federal Register on Oct. 22.

The museum determined the hat is an object of cultural patrimony, an item of ongoing historical, traditional or cultural importance central to a Native group itself, which can include a clan or lineage. The museum also found a connection between the hat and Tlingit & Haida, which says it represents more than 38,000 citizens worldwide.

The hat was donated to the museum by the Fred Harvey Company and has been on exhibit in the museum's Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians since June 1998. The notice gives no donation date, does not say how the company got the hat and names no clan or community of origin.

The determinations are the museum's alone. "The National Park Service is not responsible for the determinations in this notice," reads the notice, signed by Melanie O'Brien, manager of the Park Service's national repatriation program.

Until Nov. 23, tribes or lineal descendants not named in the notice may send written requests to the museum. Claimants must show by a preponderance of the evidence that they are descendants or culturally affiliated.

The hall the hat is leaving covers four cultures, the Tlingit, Hopi, Lakota and Iroquois, and holds nearly 1,000 objects. The museum says it built the hall in the early 1990s with about 50 Native people and Indigenous advisers, and that it is working to reimagine the exhibit with more self-representation by Indigenous people.

Five other Park Service repatriation notices this year named Tlingit & Haida. They include a September Autry Museum notice in Los Angeles listing 31 items, among them a necklace collected in Southeast Alaska. In October, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, gave notice it plans to return a Brown Bear Chilkat Robe to Tlingit & Haida after Nov. 9, Alaska News reported Oct. 8.

Tlingit & Haida's Cultural Resources program says it has repatriated more than 145 objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and more than 40 under the National Museum of the American Indian Act.