After 33 Years, More Than 200 Meskwaki Objects Come Home

History was made quietly on April 28, 2026, when more than 200 cultural objects belonging to the Meskwaki Nation came home in a single day — the largest mass return of Meskwaki items from any institution to date. Known collectively as the Mary Alicia Owen Collection, the pieces had long been held by the Missouri State Museum in Jefferson City, far from the tribal community to which they belong.

The journey home was decades in the making. The Meskwaki Nation formally engaged the Missouri State Museum about repatriation in 1993, beginning a patient process that would ultimately span 33 years. Rather than returning items one at a time through a piecemeal process, the tribe and the museum eventually agreed on something more meaningful: to repatriate the entire collection together, as a single, intact whole. That decision, reached in early 2025, allowed the objects to return not as scattered fragments but as the coherent cultural record they were always meant to be.

“Known collectively as the Mary Alicia Owen Collection, the pieces had long been held by the Missouri State Museum in Jefferson City, far from the tribal community to which they belong.”

The homecoming carries deep significance for the Meskwaki, a people who have long fought to keep their language, ceremonies and identity intact. Having these objects back on Meskwaki land means they can once again be cared for according to the community's own values and traditions, and can help teach younger generations about their heritage in the place where that heritage lives.

Johnathan Buffalo, the tribe's Historic Preservation Director, reflected on the woman whose name the collection bears with striking generosity. “Ms. Owen will be remembered as one of many contributors who glimpsed the beauty and worthiness of our culture even if they didn't truly understand it,” he said — a recognition that the objects' long detour, however painful, was part of a story now being set right.

The return is part of a broader movement gaining momentum across the United States, as museums work with tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to reunite communities with objects and ancestral remains long held far from home. Each such return is more than an administrative transfer; it is an act of respect and repair, and a step toward a future in which Indigenous heritage rests, once more, in Indigenous hands.