Inside the University of Montana’s Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, Donovan Taylor stretched his arms across a wooden conference table holding his phone, which was recording, up to two gray speakers. He furrowed his brow and closed his eyes as he listened to a 1968 recording of a Cheyenne love song.  Next to him, Theresa Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council, leaned closer to the speakers and cupped a hand to her right ear, trying to hear the drums and singers through the lo-fi audio.  After months of consultation with the school, a group of about a dozen Northern Cheyenne elders and cultural leaders traveled from the southeastern Montana reservation to the University of Montana in Missoula last week to review and reclaim ownership of dozens of culturally significant items, recordings and documents in the university’s collections. When such belongings are returned to tribal ownership, Indigenous leaders say, community members regain connection to their identity, ancestors and history. “They don’t sing like that now,” Taylor, a traditional singer himself, told the group after the song ended. “We’re losing our culture.”  Donovan Taylor traveled from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to the University of Montana with other cultural leaders to review items in the university’s collections. Credit: Casandra Evans/University of Montana UM has digitized dozens of audio recordings of Cheyenne songs and interviews with elders, which were originally recorded on cassettes or wax cylinders by anthropologists or professors. But the digitizations are imperfect. Some of the recordings sound slow and garbled, like the speakers are underwater. Others make the voices of Northern Cheyenne elders sound high-pitched, like chipmunks.  Taylor asked Wallace Bearchum, chair of the Northern Cheyenne Cultural Commission, to play the Cheyenne love song again. He closed his eyes again as drums filled the room. “I’m going to try to learn it,” he said. “Bring it back.” Universities, museums and other institutions nationwide house Native American ancestral remains, cultural artifacts and belongings. Sometimes, the items have been donated. Other times, an employee may have purchased or unethically obtained tribal belongings for research purposes. It’s often unknown how the possessions were originally taken from tribes, whether they were stolen from graves or traded.  The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990 and commonly known as NAGPRA, establishes processes by which tribes can request the return of belongings and ancestral remains from institutions that house them. But in the more than 30 years since it passed, many institutions remain noncompliant with the law. ProPublica reported in 2023 that about half of the institutionally held remains of 210,000 Native Americans had not been returned.  In 2024, new NAGPRA provisions strengthened tribal authority in repatriation processes, requiring institutions that receive federal funding to get tribal consent before displaying or providing public access to tribes’ cultural belongings. New regulations also require institutions to consult with tribes on all tribal belongings within a five-year deadline. Complying with NAGPRA is rarely straightforward. Institutions, which may hold thousands of items, must identify which tribe an item belongs to and contact appropriate people within the tribe to facilitate its return. UM in 2023 hired Courtney Little Axe, the school’s first full-time NAGPRA repatriation coordinator and collections manager, and during the 2025 legislative session lawmakers passed a state budget that included a $367,665 appropriation to UM to support repatriation efforts. That money, Little Axe said, was used to establish a student NAGPRA team at UM, with one student repatriation liaison assigned to each tribe in the state.  But most educational and historical institutions in Montana don’t have a full-time role dedicated to repatriation. Montana State University works in conjunction with the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman on repatriation work. A spokesperson for MSU said the university’s sociology and anthropology departments reached out to 14 tribes in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming in 1996, but no claims were made on items in the school’s possession. The Museum of the Rockies, the spokesperson said, has contacted at least 21 tribes since the 1990s and repatriated several items. As of Jan. 6, 2025, UM reported having made 83% of more than 200 funerary objects in its holdings available for return to tribes, according to ProPublica’s repatriation database. MSU reported having made none of the 49 funerary objects in its possession available for return, according to the same data.  Bearchum said that since the new NAGPRA provisions were enacted, he’s heard from institutions across the country that possess, and want to return, Northern Cheyenne belongings. The problem, he said, is that the tribe doesn’t have appropriate facilities to receive and store them.  “The issues are money and manpower,” he said, adding that building a temperature-controlled repository with fireproof displays and security could cost millions of dollars. Inside the social sciences building on UM’s campus Wednesday afternoon, Northern Cheyenne Council member Theresa Small held her hand over a beaded pipe bag displayed on a table alongside other items in UM’s collection.  Northern Cheyenne community members hug after the tribe formally took ownership of cultural items in the University of Montana’s collections. Credit: Casandra Evans/University of Montana “Hmm,” she said. “This has come a long way to be here.”  Tribal elders and cultural leaders walked around the table, examining the items — a beaded pouch, moccasins, dolls and pipe bags. The designs, colors and materials, they said, tell a story. A bag had been repurposed from a pair of beaded leggings. The soles on a pair of moccasins were made from a parfleche bag.  “They used everything they could to survive,” Little Axe said. Bearchum pointed to a pair of green, blue and gold beaded moccasins. The symbols — representing a tipi, thunderbirds, and the sun — tell stories of how Northern Cheyenne people hunted and held ceremonies, he said. “It’s beautiful,” he said, looking at the shoes. “Our people are smart.” Annie Bement, an elder, pointed to a doll with solid blue leggings.  “I’m not sure that one’s ours,” she said. Others in the group nodded.  Mikaylia Yellowrobe, a UM repatriation liaison for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and Northern Cheyenne herself, stuck a coral-colored Post-it note to the table near the doll. “Needs more research,” she scribbled.  Bement, 78, never expected to see items like this in her lifetime. She grew up speaking the Cheyenne language at home, but speaking Cheyenne at school came at a cost. She attended St. Labre Indian School, a Catholic boarding school on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in the 1950s and 1960s. It was one of hundreds of schools nationwide that operated with the explicit mission of assimilation.  “We were slapped for speaking [Cheyenne],” Bement said. “We had to put our hands on a table and were hit with a ruler to be punished.” Assimilation efforts like those implemented in the boarding school era have contributed to the widespread loss of cultural knowledge and language. Three of the 12 Indigenous languages historically spoken in Montana are considered critically endangered, meaning their youngest speakers are elders who speak the language infrequently, according to a 2020 Montana Budget and Policy Center report. Bement is one of just 300 fluent Cheyenne speakers alive today. “Our values, our stories, our history is contained in the language,” Bearchum said. “It relates to our identity.”  Small said hearing elders speak Cheyenne on old recordings “is a treat.” She hopes they’ll be used to educate young people on the reservation. Connecting with history that was once taken from tribal members, she said, is restorative. “Without the ability to see where we came from, we’d be wandering,” Small said. “This is who we are. This is our identity.” Standing before a crowd of Northern Cheyenne community members and university representatives on Wednesday evening, Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Teanna Limpy and Little Axe signed several agreements to establish tribal stewardship and formally transfer ownership of the belongings in UM’s possession to the tribe.  While it has chosen to continue to house the belongings at the university, “The tribe will now have full authority in what we do, how we handle items, how we store them, how we move them between buildings, and if we educate people using specific belongings or not,” Little Axe said at the signing event. “This gives the tribe authority over their own story.” Limpy told the crowd she hopes the tribe will one day have a museum to house the belongings.  “This is just the first step,” she said, as the crowd cheered. 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