Petaluma woman returns Native American artifacts to tribes

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Today is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, held annually on the second Monday in October, celebrating and honoring Indigenous American people while commemorating their histories and cultures.

I grew up visiting my father’s mother in her Southern California home, where Granny sat in her study in an overstuffed black leather chair, surrounded by books and newspapers.

She was also surrounded by Native American artifacts of every kind, collected over decades.

Margaret Fleming grew up an only child in well-to-do East Coast family. She traveled extensively with her family. On one trip, they stopped in Pasadena, California. She never forgot the scent of the orange blossoms and the beauty of the mountains, as well as the allure of the West. In 1929, when she and my grandfather were looking a new home for their retirement, they chose Pasadena.

Granny was fascinated by Native American cultures and so began to collect artifacts. Sometimes artifact traders would come to her home in Pasadena. Other times she would travel to the Southwest by car or by train. The trains used to make stops at trading posts, and it became fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s for passengers to disembark and purchase items. My cousin recalls my grandmother talking about doing that herself.

On the wall above Granny’s blue couch was a large and beautiful fringed Chilkat blanket from Alaska, woven in yellows, pale blues and blacks. There were also Native American pots and baskets and paintings displayed on the shelves and walls. In the room next door was a small library which held a wooden chest.

When I was moving into my first apartment, Granny invited me to choose a blanket from the chest. I opened it and was met by a musty, wooly smell and a burst of colors – oranges and reds and blacks, stripes and diamonds.

I chose a Navajo Chief’s wearing blanket that for many years hung on my wall. When Granny died, I inherited many more items – baskets, other blankets, a flute and more.

That was over 40 years ago.

Now it is time for them to go home.

Alaska: Yukatat Tlinget Tribe I walked into the post office in my Northern California home town of Petaluma, carrying a feather-light box destined for Yakutat, Alaska. Nestled inside, wrapped in acid-free tissue paper, was a broken yet beautiful old basket woven by the Yukatat Tlingit tribe. The basket is dark brown and open-weaved with two woven golden bands like a geometric snake, zigzagging back and forth around both the top and bottom of the basket.

I handed the box over to the postal worker, hoping its travels would be smooth and easy.

After mailing the basket to Alaska, I wrote to Marry, the Cultural Heritage Director of the Yukatat Tlingit tribe, to tell her it was on its way. She is the person who had answered my exploratory phone call about sending the basket home, and she was the person to whom I had texted a photo of the basket to see if it belonged with her tribe – the modern world nudging up against the ancient.

She replied, “We would love to home your basket within our organization.”

To home the basket. That sounded right to me.

Marry has since told me that the basket was received with great joy and the emoji she used to convey this message was the one with streaming tears.

I will say that even though “homing the basket” sounded like the right thing to do, I was in fact torn, part of me wishing I could keep these things that I knew I must send back. They are beautiful. They have been in my home and in my family for over 50 years. And then a wise friend, upon hearing this story and sensing my inner struggle, simply said, “Their need is greater than your want.”

That was all I needed to hear to release my yearning.

I have been blessed to shelter these precious objects for a long time, and now they need to go back. I may have been unconsciously coming to this conclusion for a while. The Navajo Chief’s blanket has been tucked in a closet for years, not hanging on a wall. The Paiute Shoshone deer skin cradle board I used to hang on the wall is also not on display.

I embarked onto this path with my sister, who was also returning her Native objects. I have been exploring what it means to be white in America for several years now, and, as the descendant of Southern enslavers, have been focused on the great harms my ancestors did to African-Americans. But as I sat reading Black history, I would glance up at the shelves where I had a Native flute, baskets and other artifacts.

Something felt off. There was a reason I had not displayed the cradle board or the blanket in recent years. I think they did not truly feel like they were mine anymore.

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