St. Paul auction house leads effort to return sacred Native items

NINA MOINI: Well, since 2018, the Association on American Indian Affairs in Washington, DC has been tracking potentially sensitive Native items sold at auction around the world. These items often have spiritual or cultural significance to tribes around the country. And they found an ally in St. Paul-based auction house Revere Auctions. It's the only known auction house in the country that provides a path for repatriation, and has a formal process to return Native American items with spiritual significance back to tribal governments.

Joining me to talk about this work is Shannon O'Loughlin a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the CEO and Attorney with the Association on American Indian Affairs. And we have Sean Blanchette, co-founder of Revere Auction. Thank you both so much for your time today.

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: Thank you for having me for having us.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Shannon, I'd like to start with you, if I could. I wanted to learn a little bit more about your work. How often is a Native item that may have significance sold at auctions?

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: Oh, my. That's a big question that you're asking right off the top. Let me give you a little bit of statistics here. So far this year, we have been looking at auctions and monitoring them, both domestically and internationally. And so far, we found about 15,940 sensitive items for sale at auction just this year.

Now, last year, the full year, there were about 20,000 culturally sensitive items. So already this year, we have more than we had last year.

NINA MOINI: Wow.

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: So the numbers seem to be growing from a downturn during COVID, and then now, auctions seem to be selling more. And they're doing less and less online so that we can't really see what's happening out there. And they're closing their auctions. They're making them more in-person.

So it's difficult for us to really find out what's going on with the sale of items. And I think that's done intentionally to prevent organizations like ours and Native nations from understanding how our objects are being trafficked.

NINA MOINI: And, Shannon, why is it so important for you to do this work and make sure that you're able to get those items back?

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: These items-- well, first off, we have a wonderful piece of human rights legislation. It's called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And through that, Congress set forward clear definitions of what it means to wrongfully have these types of items. And it also defines what types of items are sensitive cultural items.

Items like funerary objects and ancestors' remains, items that are sacred and for religious purposes, and also items of cultural patrimony that belong to the tribal nation itself. They're not individually owned.

So Congress set forward this wonderful piece of legislation. Only, it didn't declare a remedy when private collectors hold these types of items. So it's extremely important to do this work, as Congress found, because this is a huge human rights violation that's occurred over several hundred years of colonization practices of the United States, in which Native aboriginal lands were opened for homesteading. And whatever was found on those lands has made it to the market, and even so much as burial looting and human remains, even, are up for sale at auction at times. So these items are extremely sensitive and important to Native nations to revitalize their cultures and to also put their ancestors back in the ground.

NINA MOINI: Sean, it's remarkable that Revere Auctions is the only one in the country to have jumped into this work. Why did you feel that was important to do?

SEAN BLANCHET: A real moment when we became aware of the role that auction houses played in this was when the Prairie Island community had a pipe come up for auction, which had a very important connection to Minnesota. There's a great MPR article about this. Actually, you can go listen to it on the website.

But the long short of it is that the pipe was belonged to one of the people that was executed by the US government in the 1862 hanging. And then it was passed down through non native hands, and it ended up in an auction.

Now, this pipe is incredibly important to the people that it belongs to. And the tribe was forced to compete in the auction, either with their own money or through a proxy-- I can't speak to that aspect of it-- but they were unable to just acquire it without driving the value of it up. So the significance, culturally and spiritually, made it more valuable, which, to me, just seemed like a terrible way to organize this.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And so-- go ahead. Go ahead.

SEAN BLANCHET: Oh, so it was estimated at a few thousand dollars, and ended up selling for $39,000. So, basically, the market get leveraged the cultural significance of this item to extract the maximum value for it. So, as the auction house, I said, I don't want to be party to that kind of market leverage onto a community trying to just recapture some of the things that they've lost in the past.

NINA MOINI: Didn't sit well with you. And so, Sean, how does the process work? Something comes to you, and you take a beat, and you say, wait a minute, what is this? Where did it come from? Or how do you go about returning these items?

SEAN BLANCHET: So the vast majority of objects are made by Native people that pass through our auction house are intended to be on the open market. A lot of people are familiar with Navajo jewelry, Acoma pottery. These are things that have living active native artists making them. And those are things that are important to be traded.

On the other side of the coin, there are objects that are very culturally significant and don't belong on the open market-- and maybe even never left collective ownership of a community. And so there's no even clear title to these items. So thank goodness we have this incredible ally, the AIA, that can help us navigate and separate the items that are intended to be in the market and the items that shouldn't be.

And so we send a list of everything that we have that's coming up for sale to the AIA, and they facilitate-- and they can speak to their internal process. Shannon can explain that. But they facilitate us developing a quick and nuanced understanding of the objects that we have in our auction and the role they play in the communities that made them.

NINA MOINI: So, Shannon building off of what Sean is talking about, if there's one auction house that is willing to do this work with you, what work still needs to be done just in this space?

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: Oh, my. With every other auction house and dealer and collector of Native cultural heritage items-- so Revere Auctions is a unicorn. The association has been working. We've worked really hard to try to communicate with auction houses to develop a process of good faith review.

Most auctions rely on either a bill of sale or some other sort of expertise within their own institution. And what we recommend is that in order to determine whether something really has good title and that its title hasn't been obstructed over time or recreated by people who are wanting to make more money from the objects-- so quite often, they'll recreate different stories on how the object came into their hands in order to sell it for more money-- so we are still trying to work with auction houses outside of Revere to reach out to Native nations and ask, specifically, is this an item that is part of your cultural heritage or an item that was made specifically for sale and trade?

But those auction houses and dealers have been very obstinate about not wanting to do that. In fact, they're still working to make as much money as they can off of these items, driving up prices of sensitive objects, which make it nearly impossible for tribes to get back, and threatening to sue organizations like the association for interfering in their business contract when we're simply trying to alert them that there are laws that could apply to theft of these items and that there could be some hefty litigation or other things to get these items back.

And so we try to find alternative methods for return and, of course, education, but--

NINA MOINI: Sometimes litigation, it sounds like.

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: Yeah, exactly. But auction houses and dealers generally do not want to work with us and have not been good partners.

NINA MOINI: OK. I really appreciate you both coming by. I learned a lot, and thank you so much.

SEAN BLANCHET: Well, thank you for bringing attention to this.

SHANNON O'LOUGHLIN: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was Shannon O'Laughlin, the CEO and Attorney of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and Sean Blanchet, a co-owner of Revere Auctions in St. Paul.