Harvard returns Standing Bear’s tomahawk to Nebraska tribe

Standing Bear’s pipe-tomahawk, photographed in May 2017 on display in the Native American Collection at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The museum returned the object to the Ponca tribe in a ceremony held on June 3. Standing Bear, a Native American civil rights pioneer, originally gave the pipe-tomahawk to one of his lawyers, John Lee Webster, in 1879. It passed through several hands before the university acquired it in 1982. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, photo credit Daderot. Shared under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Standing Bear’s pipe-tomahawk, photographed in May 2017 on display in the Native American collection at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Harvard officials returned the object to the Ponca tribe in a ceremony held on June 3. Standing Bear, a Native American civil rights pioneer, originally gave the pipe-tomahawk to one of his lawyers, John Lee Webster, in 1879. It passed through several hands before the university acquired it in 1982. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, photo credit Daderot. Shared under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

BOSTON (AP) – A tomahawk once owned by Chief Standing Bear, a pioneering Native American civil rights leader, has been returned to his tribe after being housed for decades in a museum at Harvard University.

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