Objects Repatriated to Oneida Indian Nation

HAMILTON, NEW YORK—The Associated Press reports that Colgate University has returned more than 1,500 objects to the Oneida Indian Nation in a ceremony at the school, which is located on the Oneida’s ancestral territory. The items, including pendants, pots, bells, turtle shell rattles, beads, knives, harpoons, and a stone pipe, were purchased in 1959 from a collector who dug them up in upstate New York, and housed in the university’s Longyear Museum of Anthropology. The university began the process of transferring human remains and funerary objects to the Oneida in 1995 under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. “It’s making things right again. It’s correcting a wrong,” commented Oneida Indian Nation Representative Ray Halbritter. To read about sites in upstate New York that preserve traces of the French and Indian War, go to "Letter from Lake George: Exploring the Great Warpath."