The Lakota Curator at 1200 Broadway Sending His Own People's Objects Home

Picture the glass case lifting. Not a staff member reaching in with gloves. The case itself coming up so a tribal member can take the object out with their own hands.

That happens at History Colorado, 1200 Broadway, and the man making it happen is doing it for his own people.

His name is Chance Ward. He is the NAGPRA Collections Specialist at the state museum, and he is a member of the Lakota tribe, an enrolled citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. So when he talks about sending objects back to the Lakota, he is talking about sending them back to family. That is not a figure of speech. That is the actual job.

Most people do not realize how personal this work gets.

What NAGPRA actually is

Quick background, because the acronym matters here. NAGPRA stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Federal law, passed in 1990. The short version is this. If an institution takes federal money, it has to coordinate with tribes about the Native American remains and cultural objects sitting in its collection. For a century, museums collected this stuff. The law finally said, you have to talk to the people it belongs to.

When that law passed, a lot of museums panicked. The fear was that NAGPRA would strip the shelves bare and leave everybody with empty buildings. Ward addressed that directly. Thirty-five years later, he said, that did not happen. The museums are still here. The collections are still here. What changed is who gets a say over them.

The objects going home

Here is what is actually happening right now.

A little over a month before 9News reported it in late September 2026, History Colorado returned 21 Native American cultural items to tribes in South Dakota and Montana. Moccasins. A pipe. A whistle. Then in a Federal Register notice dated September 9, 2026, the museum stated it intends to repatriate 20 more objects to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Ward's own tribe. An eagle bone whistle. A pipe stem. Beaded pipe bags. Leggings. Moccasins.

And there is a beaded cradleboard that was removed from a grave in Montana. That one is going back to the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.

Now, the names behind how this material ended up in a Denver museum in the first place. A lot of the Lakota pieces were originally collected by a man named James R. Walker, and by an artist named John Dare Howland, who had been a captain in the 1st Colorado Cavalry. Late 19th century, early 20th century. These were the guys documenting and gathering Lakota cultural materials back then. A century later, a Lakota man is the one sending them home. Sit with that for a second.

This is not just history

Here is the part people miss. Ward is clear that these are not artifacts behind glass that stopped mattering. Some of these objects are still used today. In tribal culture. In ceremonies. They are not relics. They are working pieces of a living culture that happened to get locked in a case in Denver for a hundred years.

That is why the glass case lifts. The museum physically raises it so tribal members take the item out themselves, instead of having a curator hand it over. Small gesture. Huge difference.

In June 2026, History Colorado invited several Lakota tribes from South Dakota to come to the museum and review objects that might belong to them. And the museum also offers long-term tribal loan agreements, which honestly is a smart, humane idea. A tribe can claim an object, legally, but leave it at the museum if they do not yet have a place to store or display it. The ownership goes home even when the shelf stays the same.

Why Colorado is leading this

So why does any of this land in a Denver publication. Because Colorado quietly became a national leader on repatriation, and most people outside the field have no idea.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the University of Colorado's Museum of Natural History were among the first institutions in the entire country to repatriate their complete Native American collections. Not pieces of them. The whole thing.

And the numbers back it up. According to 2025 data compiled by ProPublica, institutions in this state reported making 88% of the more than 4,100 Native American remains taken from Colorado available for return. Eighty-eight percent. For a law that scared museums half to death in 1990, that is a state showing the rest of the country how it is done.

Ward spoke publicly about all of this at the state museum in October 2026, and he said History Colorado will keep working with tribes on future repatriation requests. So this is not a one-time ceremony and a press release. It is ongoing.

Here is the thing. We write a lot about what is coming to Denver. New builds, new neighborhoods, who is moving in and what it costs. This is the opposite story. This is about what was taken out of South Dakota and Montana generations ago, finally heading back the other direction, carried by a man returning it to his own relatives.

If you want to see it, 1200 Broadway, phone (303) 866-5751. Go stand in front of one of those cases and think about whose hands it is really waiting for.