Investigators search for Native American items stolen decades ago in New Mexico
The bowl is among nearly 150 antiquities stolen from the Native American community's ceremonial village during a series of burglaries that started in the summer of 1984. War shields, traditional clothing, moccasins, willow baskets and woven rugs were taken — all items that would fetch favorable sums given their rarity.
Federal authorities and tribal police in New Mexico eventually busted the thieves. Pleas were entered, punishments doled out and the case was closed. Inexplicably, authorities never pursued recovery of the stolen items.
Now, the pueblo's historic preservation and repatriation experts are partnering with a tribal conservation officer who once served as the top cop for the federal Bureau of Land Management to crack this cold case, one irreplaceable item at a time.
Little to go on
Picking up the trail has not been simple. Memories fade, and digging up old documents is a monumental task.
Case files provided by the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs have helped, but key pieces of evidence are missing, including Polaroid photos found during a search of a suspect's home. The original reports contain only limited descriptions of the stolen items, further complicating the search.
The team has spent months combing through auction catalogs, gallery websites and even Pinterest and Instagram posts. A northern New Mexico antiquities dealer purchased some of the items decades ago, not knowing they were contraband. A breakthrough came when his family opened up his ledgers detailing acquisitions and sales.
The investigators started to connect dots, tracing the journey of the bowl across four decades through sales records, interviews and an out-of-print Santa Fe gallery publication. The most recent purchasers returned the bowl after learning its story.
Family members gathered this summer inside the tribal council room to be reunited with an heirloom they thought they would never see again. The bowl was sitting on the table; it was real. Disbelief gave way to tears.
Pueblo Gov. Myron Armijo described the moment as wonderful but emotional. For pueblo people, a sacred item is like another person — living, breathing and intertwined with their identity.
'You can't put a dollar amount on what was taken,' said Armijo, whose family home was among those burglarized 40 years ago. 'They were taking war shields, drums, pottery and many other items that meant so much to our community. It just really hurt the pueblo.'
Under cover of darkness
The first burglary happened in early August 1984, about a week after the pueblo northwest of Albuquerque celebrated a feast day, a rare occasion when outsiders are welcomed inside to watch traditional dances and share food.
According to case files and court records, the thieves treaded stealthily through desert scrub and sandy washes at night to the secluded pueblo at the edge of the Jemez Mountains.
Over 10 months, the thieves targeted homes and traditional society houses in the village that had been added to the national list of historic places a decade earlier.
'Picture these guys stealing blankets, filling them up with pots, everything they could carry,' said William Woody, the conservation officer helping with the investigation.
As the thieves fled, they dropped some items along the road. A rancher found other artifacts that had been stashed in the desert to be recovered later.
A nighttime sting ended the scheme in May 1985. Court records identify an Albuquerque antiquities dealer as the ringleader and some of the hired hands as members of Laguna Pueblo, another Native American community west of Albuquerque.
Federal investigations found other New Mexico pueblos were also targeted.
New Mexico is home to 19 pueblos, many situated along the Rio Grande where their ancestors settled after migrating from Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico and Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. Pueblo people maintained their homelands throughout the Spanish conquest centuries ago and later as the United States made its westward expansion.
Unlike other pueblos, Santa Ana — known as Tamaya in the Keresan language spoken there — did not sell its pottery to people outside the community. Because of its rarity, Santa Ana pottery sold for comparatively high values during the 1980s, according to the tribal historic preservation office.
No place in the commercial market
Investigators say many of the stolen items are directly related to traditional activities, meaning they qualify as sacred objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Those more than a century old qualify as antiquities protected under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.
NAGPRA has opened up more opportunities for tribes to reclaim culturally significant items from museums, universities and other institutions over the last year, and Congress passed legislation in 2022 to prohibit the export of sacred Native American items.
But the export law has yet to be implemented, and tracking items through auction houses and private collections can be difficult because descriptions are often incorrect or intentionally misleading, according to Shannon O'Loughlin, CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs.
'These are items that were part of another culture's religion, life ways, ways of being, things that hold close to our identity and that are part of our story and our relationships with one another,' said O'Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
The association, which monitors auction houses around the world, has this year identified more than 200 auctions selling 13,900 potentially sensitive items tied to Indigenous nations in North America.
Not giving up
At Santa Ana, the mission is simple — to bring home as many of the stolen items as possible.
'We know they're out there,' said Armijo, the pueblo governor. 'We're not giving up.'
Atop the list is a buffalo hide war shield decorated with a pair of horns and rays of alternating colors — symbolism still revered by the pueblo.
After reviewing ledgers kept by Larry Frank, an author and Native American art expert in northern New Mexico, the team discovered the shield had been listed for sale at a gallery in New York City. The gallery posted a picture of the shield online in 2021, saying it was from Jemez Pueblo, not Santa Ana, and noting the shield had been acquired by a Canadian collector.
Donald Ellis, the gallery's owner, told The Associated Press via email that Frank had the shield for more than two decades and that there were no claims or concerns regarding its provenance when the gallery acquired it in 2005.
'The shield was acquired in good faith, from a credible and reputable source,' Ellis said.
He said his gallery reviews all available documentation for the work it acquires and consults with experts to identify gaps in ownership history, but that it can be difficult to establish the provenance of Native American pieces from the 19th century and earlier.
Ellis said he didn't fact-check the Instagram post about the shield being sold to a Canadian collector and that he has no information on its current whereabouts.
Jarrett Lujan, a cultural resources coordinator with the pueblo, said his grandfathers taught him about passing along traditions to the coming generations. That means he must bring back the stolen pieces of Tamaya culture for his daughter and others.
'That's all we're looking for,' he said, 'to empower them and encourage them to keep the culture alive.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
3 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
New York Takes Zelle to Court Over Fraud on the Platform, Claims $1 Billion Lost
Arguably, the entire selling point of Zelle as a platform is that it is owned by big banks that ostensibly are invested in making sure that your money is safe. Turns out security was not the priority that you might imagine, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James. In a lawsuit against the money transfer, the top prosecutor for New York State claims that customers have lost more than $1 billion to fraud on Zelle, which was enabled by a lack of sufficient protections. In the suit, James alleges that Zelle has been insecure since it first launched in 2017, and its parent company, Early Warning Services (which is owned by Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and other major financial institutions), has mostly ignored the problem. 'EWS knew from the beginning that key features of the Zelle network made it uniquely susceptible to fraud, and yet it failed to adopt basic safeguards to address these glaring flaws or enforce any meaningful anti-fraud rules on its partner banks,' the AG's office said in a statement. As evidence of this point, James points out that Zelle didn't include a sufficient verification process to make users confirm their identity, making it easy for scammers to spoof others. Because transactions on Zelle can't be reversed, there is shockingly little friction between transactions to keep people from falling for impostors. The issue was so bad that Congress pressured Zelle into refunding victims of impostor scams back in 2023 after learning that users of the app had lost $440 million to such fraud that year. Not great for a platform that actively advertised itself as 'safe.' Another beef James has with Zelle: It allegedly didn't respond to consumer complaints about fraud. 'Even when EWS did receive reports of fraud, it failed to promptly remove the fraudsters from the Zelle network or require banks to reimburse consumers for certain scams,' James alleged, stating that when the app launched, the parent company didn't even require banks to report scams, which theoretically could have prevented network-wide abuse. New York's lawsuit picks up where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau left off. The agency had announced it was suing JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo in December 2024, alleging similar charges of fraud and failure to protect users. That case was dropped almost immediately by the Trump administration, which proceeded to fire the head of the bureau and attempted to shutter it entirely. Trump probably can't shut down the state of New York, so this case should likely continue.
CBS News
5 minutes ago
- CBS News
Visitors warned not to feed bears at national parks amid increase in incidents: "Bears learn quickly"
The National Park Service is warning visitors not to feed black bears, saying that giving the animals food could lead to serious consequences for the animal and large fines. "Feeding bears is not only illegal; it can be extremely dangerous for bears and visitors," the Great Smoky Mountains National Park wrote in the warning. The park reported an increase in incidents where tourists intentional fed bears, including three separate occurrences in just one week. In one case, a visitor fed a mother bear and her two cubs and was issued a citation. Intentionally feeding wildlife in the park is a federal offense and can result in fines of up to $5,000 or imprisonment for up to six months, park officials said. Any park visitor who sees someone intentionally feeding a bear should inform park authorities, the NPS said. "Bears learn quickly" and are endangered by intentional feeding, the park said. If a bear is fed by a person even once, that can lead to the animal becoming "conditioned to human food," the park said. This can result in the bear seeking out people and exhibiting more aggressive behavior while losing its natural fear of humans, putting both park visitors and bears at risk. Bears seeking out human food are also more likely to be hit by a car, the park said. "In some cases, feeding a bear can result in the euthanasia of the animal," the park said. Officials in Yellowstone National Park had to trap and kill an 11-year-old male grizzly bear in May after the animal became conditioned to human food. The bear began overturning bear-resistant dumpsters and trash cans to access human food, the park said. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to about 1,900 American black bears, according to the NPS. Bear activity is high in the area between May and August because the animal's breeding season is putting a stress on natural food sources. Eighteen-month-old yearlings are also being left by their mothers and learning how to navigate on their own for the first time. These younger bears are more likely to wander into areas where humans are, the park said. About 339 "negative human-bear encounters" are reported annually in the park, the NPS said. Many more incidents go unreported. While black bears are not normally aggressive, they will defend food and cubs. They may fight back if cornered, and may attack dogs, the NPS said. Dogs are involved in the majority of physical encounters between people and bears, the agency said. Visitors to national parks should never feed or approach bears. Coming within 150 feet of the animals can result in fines and arrest, the park said. All food and trash should be stored securely and disposed of in bear-resistant containers. Visitors should also stay alert while in the park, and report unusual bear behavior to park authorities.
CBS News
5 minutes ago
- CBS News
Surveillance captures 2 robberies in same week at River West bar
A bar has been targeted multiple times this week in the River West neighborhood. New surveillance video shows a robbery and an assault inside while the bar was open. The two robberies have happened with customers inside the Dandy Crown bar and restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue over just the past three days, and the owner said they've been victims of break-ins before. In the first robbery that happened late Monday night, surveillance video from inside the bar shows a masked man walking in. The owner said a masked man told the bartender he had a knife. When he finds there's nothing to take from the register, he takes the purses and phones of the bartender and another woman sitting at the bar before he leaves. The second robbery was more violent. It happened Wednesday night, just after 8 p.m. Footage showed a man in all black and a baseball cap walking into the bar. At first, he's on his phone and told the bartender he's waiting for a friend. Eventually, he starts going through an employee's purse. As she tries to get her things back, the man grabs her leg and flips her over a chair before running out. Police are investigating both robberies, and no arrests have been made. The bar owner said they are putting some security measures in place and also hoping the city can help.
