The above photo is from Reuters. The Northern Arapaho share the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming with the Eastern Shoshone. The reservation spans more than 2 million acres.
[Episcopal News Service – Casper, Wyoming] Lyle Valdez is junior warden at Our Father’s House, a congregation of Northern Arapaho Episcopalians on the Wind River Reservation just southeast of Yellowstone National Park. Valdez, 59, has heard elders talk for many years of someday bringing home a collection of about 200 tribal items that have been in the possession of Wyoming’s Episcopal diocese since the 1940s.
The items range from ceremonial headdresses and handcrafted women’s dresses to children’s toys and medicine bags, all collected by a white Great Depression-era deaconess who received them in trade for the goods she sold at a mission store on the reservation. The collection also includes some sacred items that tribal leaders say should never have left the possession of the tribe.
On Oct. 14, the Arapaho elders’ dreams will be fulfilled. The Episcopal Church in Wyoming has agreed to return the collection of items, and a series of ceremonies are planned on Indigenous Peoples Day that will start at the diocesan offices in Casper and conclude more than two hours west in the Wind River community of Ethete, where Our Father’s House occupies the former St. Michael’s Mission.
“I’m glad they’re coming back,” Valdez said of the tribal items in an interview with Episcopal News Service last weekend during a break in the diocese’s annual convention in Casper. “It’s about time. It’s a long time coming.”
The Northern Arapaho, who share the Wind River Reservation with the Eastern Shoshone, have known for decades of the items, which the diocese calls its Edith May Adams Collection, but tribal leaders had gotten little traction in their requests for repatriation of the items until now. Their recent progress coincides with a broader movement across the United States to pressure museums and other institutions to return certain Indigenous artifacts to the tribes where they originated. Proponents say repatriation of tribal items can help counter the centuries of attempted extermination and forced assimilation of Indigenous tribes by the dominant white society.
Such tribal items are “a link to our history and our people,” Jordan Dresser, a Northern Arapaho member who lives in Colorado, told ENS in a phone interview. “Our people made these items, and they mean something to all of us.”
Dresser works as a curator of collections at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. He felt called to his current profession as a direct result of his experience with the Wyoming diocese’s collection starting in 2012. At that time, Dresser worked for the Wind River Casino, which wanted to create an exhibit about tribal culture. Dresser volunteered to help assemble the exhibit but discovered that few Arapaho or Shoshone still had items that could tell the story of their cultural heritage.
He soon learned of the Episcopal Church in Wyoming’s collection and asked the diocese for permission to put some of the items on display at the casino. “In the beginning, we were told no,” Dresser recalled. “They weren’t sure how we were going to care for [the items] in that setting.”
Eventually, the diocese allowed the casino to receive about 25 items on loan, enough to establish the casino’s cultural exhibit, he said. The collection, however, remained under control of the diocese, and at some point in the past decade, diocesan officials took back the items, which have since been stored mostly unseen in the basement of the diocesan offices.
In 2017, Dresser and the diocese were featured in the documentary, “What Was Ours,” about Indigenous attempts to repatriate cultural artifacts. The items collected by Edith May Adams, the Episcopal deaconess, were highlighted by the film. Despite the renewed attention, the collection remained with the diocese.
Museums and other institutions “have been stewards of items that belong to us, and a lot of times they were not taken in the right ways,” Dresser told ENS.
Tribal leaders have not suggested Adams took the items in her collection unethically, though the context matters. From 1938 to 1946, Adams ministered to tribal members already dealing with generational poverty who were seeking supplies from her mission store at a time of widespread economic deprivation. Dresser and others have suggested the tribal members may simply have had no other choice than to trade away cherished family items.
Little information is readily available about Adams’ life and her time in Wyoming. Researcher Joan Gundersen compiled some biographical details for a 2005 historical article about a church that Adams’ helped found in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in 1938 before she relocated to Wyoming.
Adams was born in 1886 in Kansas, according to Gundersen, and she grew up in Hinsdale, Illinois, where she attended Grace Episcopal Church. In 1921, at age 35, Adams enrolled at the Church Training School and Deaconess House in Philadelphia, and after completing her studies there in 1923, she served for two years in that city before returning to Illinois. She became a deaconess in a 1927 service at Grace Episcopal Church in Hinsdale.
Edith May Adams, right, is pictured with an unidentified child during her time serving in the Diocese of Chicago in the late 1920s and 1930s. Photo: The Episcopal Church Archives
Gundersen described Adams then as “a tiny, thin, energetic woman in her forties” who came from an affluent family. By the time she moved to Wyoming, her parents had died and left her a trust fund. “The income was such that she filled out a form early in her deaconate saying that she would not need a pension,” Gundersen wrote.
A diocesan article this month about the Oct. 14 repatriation celebration says Adams “ran a small market where residents could purchase food and other household items” at St. Michael’s Mission. By the time Adams left Wyoming, she had “accumulated a substantial collection of Northern Arapaho artifacts which have been preserved in anticipation of the construction of a suitable display area on the reservation,” according to an archived diocesan webpage about collection. Adams deeded the items to the diocese in 1946, and when she died in 1976, her will provided “substantial funds” for use by the Wyoming bishop.
In 2017, then-Bishop John Smylie, in an interview for the documentary “What Was Ours,” alluded to ongoing discussions between the diocese and the tribe about loaning items for an exhibit, if suitable space could be found. “We can open up the collection more than we were ever able to over the last 50 years,” Smylie said.
The Wyoming Standing Committee has been the diocese’s ecclesiastical authority since March 2024, when the diocese’s last bishop agreed to give up ordained ministry to resolve a disciplinary case. The Rev. Meghan Nickles, the standing committee president, told ENS that the diocese developed a greater sense of urgency this year as she and other diocesan leaders met with tribal elders, preservationists and clergy.
“We just came to a recognition that it’s wrong [for the diocese] to have the articles,” Nickles said. Adams may have had good intentions, but by trading supplies for Indigenous families’ possessions, “she was there to uphold the church systems and white hegemony.” And for many years, Nickles added, the diocese has failed to question the systemic conditions that perpetuated such power imbalances.
In early July, a group of about 15 people, including Dresser, tribal leaders, elders and church officials, were invited to visit the diocesan offices in Casper to inspect the collection, mostly Arapaho items and some Shoshone. Some of the items were deemed so sacred that the diocese allowed the tribal officials to retrieve them immediately. The rest were catalogued for transfer on Oct. 14.
“It was a very profound experience,” said the Rev. Roxanne Friday, the priest-in-charge for the two Episcopal congregations on the Wind River Reservation. Friday, who is Eastern Shoshone, told ENS that some elders began crying, saying they could feel the presence of their ancestors who had made the items.
“The feeling that we got from those items, it was profound,” Friday said. “There were tears, and there was a very strong feeling that we needed to get these back.”
The Rev. Roxanne Friday distributes Communion at Our Father’s House in Ethete, Wyoming. Photo: Episcopal Church in Wyoming
After a scheduled Oct. 14 ceremony in Casper, the collection will be loaded into vehicles, and tribal leaders and church officials will head west in a caravan to St. Michael’s Circle on the diocese’s mission campus in Ethete. At 1 p.m. the public will be invited to attend “A Coming Home Celebration: Noe’heeckoohut hiisi'” to receive the items and to honor the tribal members who have worked to preserve Northern Arapaho history and culture. The event will feature an Arapaho honor guard, drummers, singers and traditional prayer.
The celebration is “a welcoming home,” Dresser said, “and a thank you to everybody who made this possible.” He is anticipating the day with a mix of joy and disbelief.
“I never thought that it would happen,” he said. It took “years and years of hard work, and our people are finally reaping the benefits of that work. … This is a big moment for us, because it’s reclaiming our cultural identity.”
– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.