A combination of the Covid pandemic and changing demographics has led them to expand their visions and horizons.

Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that the art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view.

Beatty, an Alaska Native, had worked on a radio documentary about the two Alutiiq objects and how they and others like them had been plundered from tribal land about 150 years ago. Now, the masks were on display in the biggest and most esteemed art museum in the western hemisphere. “It was super shocking to me,” she said.

The Met’s ownership history for the masks, also known as provenance, omits more than a century of their whereabouts. Historians say the masks were taken in 1871. But the museum’s timeline doesn’t start until 2003, when the Dikers bought them from a collector. Ownership was transferred to the Met in 2017.

The Dikers, who have amassed one of the most significant private collections of Native American works, have been donating or lending objects to the Met since 1993. In 2017, as other institutions grappled with returning colonial-era spoils, the Met announced the Dikers’ gift of another 91 Native American works.

A ProPublica review of records the museum has posted online found that only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland”.

Experts say a lack of documented histories is a red flag that objects could have been stolen or may be fake.

“That’s a lot of missing documentation, which is a problem,” said Kelley Hays-Gilpin, a curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona. The Arizona museum has documented about 80% of its collection, as has the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions that are considered less prestigious than the Met but that have substantial Native American collections. Some museums, such as one at the University of Denver, decline gifts that have poor provenance.

For centuries, Native Americans have decried the looting of the graves of their ancestors by pothunters and scientists and the display of their remains and belongings in museums. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra) to facilitate the return of such items and human remains to the appropriate tribes, which the law declares are their rightful owners.

Nagpra requires federally funded museums to notify a tribe within six months of receiving their holdings by contacting and consulting with that tribe’s chosen representative, often known as a tribal historic preservation officer, and giving them an opportunity to reclaim their objects. The law also mandates that museums file a copy of those notices with the National Park Service (NPS).

These interactions provide an opportunity for institutions to learn more about the history of objects, whether they are authentic or might have been stolen and if it’s appropriate to display them. But as ProPublica has reported this year, museums have often delayed such discussions while keeping human remains and objects that the law says should be returned.

Some pieces in the Diker collection are sacred, such as a shaman’s rattle made of human or horse hair; some are funereal and were buried with the dead. (The Met recently returned the rattle to the Dikers, and there are “ongoing consultations” related to some other items, according to the museum.)

“Most of these items could only have ended up in private hands through trafficking and looting,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which advocates for tribal sovereignty and the protection of Native American cultures.

“The way that so many of these things wound up in museums is horrible,” said Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage and a Tlingit citizen. New York law goes by the principle of once stolen, always stolen, and she said the pieces were tainted. “The rightful thing is for these things to be returned home.”

Initially, many of the objects were loans; due to a loophole in Nagpra, this meant the museum did not have to report them to tribes or to the NPS. To date, the museum has accepted the transfer of 77 of the promised gifts from the Diker collection, according to the Met.

The Dikers have long been known for their art collection and philanthropy.

Valerie Diker is the daughter of the late Norman Tishman, who in the mid-20th century played key roles in rebuilding Manhattan’s Park Avenue and developing Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Charles Diker grew up in Brooklyn and became chairman of Cantel Medical, which sold in 2021 for $4.6bn.

The two are founding members of the National Museum of the American Indian, and Charles is an honorary trustee at the Met. Their collecting, however, has been controversial.

ProPublica found that the couple had obtained an item from the excavation of an ancient Mayan court residence in Guatemala. The site, La Corona, has been a source for black market antiquities since the 1970s, according to published reports.

In 1995, the Dikers donated a lintel that commemorated the birth of a Mayan ruler’s son in 660 AD to the Israel Museum. Guatemala didn’t ban exporting its cultural heritage until 1999. But the 1970 Unesco Convention, which the US signed, bans the export and import of cultural property.

“While it may have been legal to export it at the time, it was certainly unethical and it should be returned to Guatemala,” said Jaime Awe of Northern Arizona University, a Belizean archaeologist who has conducted legal excavations of Mayan sites.

In a statement, the Dikers said: “We are great believers in the Unesco convention.”

During the 1990s, the Dikers also donated to the Met three Mayan pieces from Guatemala, dating from the 1st century BC to the 9th century AD. Their ownership histories are blank or begin in the 1970s, during Guatemala’s civil war.

“Our collecting practice for over 50 years has always centered on proceeding carefully, assessing all available information relating to provenance before acquiring a work, and welcoming new information should it come to light,” the Dikers said in the statement.

In 2017, when the Dikers promised to give some of their Native American collection to the Met, they insisted that the museum not place it in the hall of ethnography, but in the American wing alongside Frederic Remington and other American artists.

Some art critics applauded that move. But most of the 20 tribal historic preservation officers and other tribal representatives that ProPublica interviewed about the exhibit objected to their ancestral objects being treated as decorative.

In their statement, the Dikers said: “As we said when we first promised the works to the Museum, our vision and advocacy has always been to inspire wide recognition of the power and beauty of these works and, through the Met’s stewardship, advance scholarship and understanding of Native American art and culture.”

But ProPublica found that after assuming ownership, the Met for years failed to consult the necessary tribal officials in a timely and consistent manner about objects in its collections. A year passed before the museum contacted someone at the Alutiiq tribe to inform them that it had their masks. (The Met declined to name the person it contacted.) Four years later, the NPS posted summaries that the Met had sent in September 2022 to 63 tribes connected to objects in the Diker Collection. The Met did so after ProPublica asked the museum about the masks and other sacred and culturally sensitive items.

All the while, the museum displayed some items with incorrect descriptions and omitted or minimized the wars, occupations, massacres and exploitation that dominated the tribes’ past.

The Met’s descriptions in its displays “are in the land of make-believe”, said Wendy Teeter, the former curator at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The public won’t have a clue as to what a piece really is or how it got there.” This, Teeter said, “perpetuates stereotypes and bias against Native people”.

Dan Monroe, who helped draft NAGPRA and is a former director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said the long delays in notifying tribal representatives and the NPS were a violation of the law: “They have a responsibility to follow the law and are subject to fines if they don’t.”

In a written statement, the museum said: “Although some progress has been made in updating the online catalog information and providing more complete provenance information, we recognize there is still much work to do and that this is an ongoing process that requires relationship building, patience, and great care. This is important work, and it is precisely one of the intentions of the Dikers to have a large, well-resourced institution such as the Met devote the time and scholarship to these Native items.”

The museum also stated that it was misleading to use “complete ownership histories as a standard for judging a collection”, noting that much of the Diker collection had previously been exhibited and researched by other major US museums. “When new information about collection items comes to light, we openly share it (if advised by Indigenous leaders to do so), or remove culturally sensitive items from view as requested.”

During its investigation, ProPublica asked the Met to comment on statements about the collection. Some sources who had made on-the-record statements that were shared with the museum by ProPublica later asked to withdraw their statements. One indicated that they’d been contacted by a Met employee. (The Met said it constantly engaged with a wide range of professionals and did not exert any pressure on sources for this story.)

The Dikers declined interview requests. In a written statement to ProPublica, they said: “For nearly 50 years, inspiring appreciation for the arts of Native America has been our greatest passion.” The couple also said that they had assessed “all available information relating to provenance” before acquiring the works.

If a museum can prove it has legal title, meaning that the object’s creator, their descendants or a tribal representative willingly transferred the piece, the museum doesn’t have to return an item. But if a tribal officer requests the return of an item, a museum must comply, unless it can prove it’s part of the chain of ownership, ideally going back to its origin. Complicating matters, thousands of Native American pieces at the Met have been in its collection since 1889, an era when many museums didn’t track the ownership histories of such works.

Questions about the legitimacy of the Met’s ownership of artwork extend beyond its American wing. As part of a sweeping investigation into the trafficking of antiquities, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has issued nine warrants over the past five years to seize about three dozen looted artifacts at the Met, as well as computers, memos and other material related to the objects.

In July, agents seized 21 works valued at $11m from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the course of several years, dozens of stolen artifacts had been provided as gifts or loans by Met donors who later were flagged for art improprieties. They include the British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who in 2006 was linked to a trafficking network and is now reportedly on the run; the gallery owner Subhash Kapoor, who was arrested in 2011 in Germany for art theft and in 2022 was sentenced in India to 10 years in prison; and the hedge fund founder Michael Steinhardt, who bought dozens of stolen antiquities that had no provenance and who denied criminal wrongdoing, but in 2021 agreed to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities to resolve a criminal investigation. Steinhardt’s name adorns a Met gallery.

The Met is also negotiating with the Cambodian government over dozens of allegedly stolen pieces, including objects donated or sold by the late dealer Douglas AJ Latchford, who worked with a former Met curator.

Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan who leads the office’s antiquities trafficking unit, said he and his team had found the sales histories of the seized antiquities were either fraudulent, incomplete or nonexistent. The DA’s office looked at filing charges for criminal possession of stolen property. “But their actions didn’t cross the threshold of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’” Bogdanos told ProPublica, so no charges were filed.

The Met said in its statement that it had drafted a new Native American Arts Initiative in 2021 under the guidance of its “first-ever” curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha, an Indigenous community in Mexico). The initiative, said the museum, includes “creating an advisory committee and hiring a full-time staff position that will collaboratively focus on Nagpra responsibilities and further prioritize the building of ongoing partnerships as well as the strengthening of community collaborations”. In March, the Met said it was also hiring a Native American art researcher whose responsibilities would include “some provenance research”.

What follows are the stories behind several Indigenous pieces that the Dikers have loaned or given to the Met. ProPublica interviewed experts and cultural officers at the affiliated tribes to learn how some of the Diker collection objects survived brutality, theft and exploitation, little of which the visitors who pay to see them learn about from the museum.

The two carved masks that Beatty was shocked to see at the exhibit’s opening still hang in the museum. A description of them on the Met’s website says that “spirits communicate with people through whistling: these masks may be the faces of such supernatural beings”.

They may be sacred. But that’s only part of the story.

The Alutiit have lived on the Aleutian Islands in south-west Alaska for 7,500 years. In winter, people would once huddle indoors and create utensils, clothes and ceremonial objects. Using beaver-tooth tools, they would carve wood faces, painting them blue, green and red and adorning them with feathers and fur.

At a preordained time, the Alutiit would don their masks and dance and sing in ritual, said April GL Counceller, director of the Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository in Kodiak, Alaska. A lot of the masks’ power was tied to those who had passed, she said: “For other ceremonies, the masks were a way to communicate with spirit helpers.” After the ceremony, people would hide the masks in caves to let the “sky creatures’’ rest until the next rite.

In 1740, Russians invaded the area for its sea otter fur. They forced Alutiiq males as young as 12 to hunt and held Alutiiq women as ransom. People died of starvation, disease and abuse. After a century, the sea otter population had nearly collapsed, and the Russians left. The US then arrived and set up schools that punished Native children for speaking their language. By the 1890s, the population of the Alutiit had dropped by 90% to 1,500.

Museums rushed to grab what was left of Alaskan cultures. When a Western Union expedition headed north, the Smithsonian Institution’s assistant manager, Spencer Baird, made sure that 20-year-old William Dall was on board to “salvage” tribal objects. Baird paid Dall $200 a year ($7,000 in today’s dollars) to ship his hoard to the museum. Baird also used “salvagers” on army expeditions, navy cutters and other quests, acquiring tens of thousands of pieces. The Met obtained Tsimshian rattles and Tlingit reed pipes from donors around this time.

“Almost everything that wasn’t nailed down or hidden was taken away,” said Worl, the Sealaska Heritage president.

The Met said it had provided “updated summaries to Alaskan Native communities” and “the Tsimshian and other North-west Coast communities are on our list to receive new collection Nagpra summaries”.

In 1871, 19-year-old Alphonse Pinart of France arrived. He spent months paddling a skin-covered kayak along the 600-mile Kodiak archipelago, stopping at islands where he found caves. Inside those caves, Pinart unearthed graves and helped himself to human remains, funeral items and masks, according to his journals.

That November, he stayed on Kodiak Island and learned the masks were used in Alutiiq rituals; he got to watch some ceremonies and published a paper about his findings.

After six months, he shipped the masks home to Pas-de-Calais and left. Before he died in 1911, he donated 87 artifacts to a small museum in a castle near Calais. They sat forgotten by the Alutiit for seven generations.

The Met’s provenance only lists owners from the past 20 years. The Dikers purchased the two masks in 2003 and donated them to the Met in 2017. The museum filed a summary with the NPS listing them in 2022, five years after the deadline.

The museum stated that in 2023, “it was recommended that the masks remain on view to provide community access”. Tribal members who live where the masks were made must travel 3,500 miles to reach the New York museum.

In 2019, the Met displayed this bag of arrows with a placard reading: “The painted and beaded patterns on this quiver symbolize protective sacred powers.”

This description indicates the object is holy and, out of respect, should not be displayed, said Ramon Riley, the cultural resource and Nagpra representative for the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona. “But I need to see the documents showing how they escaped from their home,” he said, meaning their provenance.

The Met lists no such history. And because the Dikers loaned the quiver set to the Met in 2017 and didn’t transfer title to the museum, the Met wasn’t required to inform tribes that it possessed the item.

For the Met to list the piece merely as “Apache” shows a lack of due diligence, as there are more than 10 Apache tribes. If Met curators had contacted any of those tribes, they might have learned which group created the items. These pieces have a history that should be respected, said Riley: “The set could have been looted or taken at gunpoint.”

In the 1870s, one of the more ruthless leaders in US military history, Gen William Tecumseh Sherman, was pursuing the Apaches. During the civil war, he had burned Atlanta. As commanding general of the army and director of the Indian wars, he was using similar scorched-earth methods, including devising the slaughter of 5 million buffalo to starve Native Americans.

At the time, the US was planning its first world’s fair: the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. The Smithsonian was asked to create an Indian “artifact” gallery to rival the antiquities in European museums.

In 1873, the Smithsonian’s director, Joseph Henry, wrote Sherman: “We are desirous of procuring large numbers” of Native American “dress, ornament, weapons”. He asked Sherman to tell his soldiers to send “specimens” from the battlefield. At Sherman’s request, Henry paid each uniformed “picker” up to $500 (the equivalent of $14,000 today).

The plan helped produce one of the fair’s more popular exhibits, which included Apache arrows. When the expo closed, Henry’s deputy packed the collection onto 48 rail cars bound for Washington DC.

By 1878, the demand for “Indian” items had grown so large that the Smithsonian asked the public to unearth “American Aboriginal” artifacts from mounds, caves and cemeteries. Soon, the spoils of war and grave robbing filled America’s new museums like the Met, but few items had documentation or provenance.

Riley learned this while searching for the remains of his clan relative. His ancestor worked as an army scout, carrying a government-issued rifle and his own bow and arrows. But during a massacre he was arrested for mutiny and hung, said Riley. The scout was buried with his possessions. Days later, his body was dug up and displayed in a cabinet inside Fort Grant, in what was then the Arizona Territory. Eventually, his remains were shipped to the Smithsonian.

Riley doesn’t think his relative’s quiver set was displayed by the Met; he believes that the set in the Diker Collection is a funerary item. “But to people like the Dikers, it’s all art,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

In March, after ProPublica had asked about it, the Met said it had been made aware that the quiver-and-arrow set was “potentially culturally sensitive” and had removed it from public display. The loaned item has not yet been returned to the Dikers.

When the Met displayed this item in 2019, the placard read: “During early reservation life, Plains people created objects such as this for sale to visiting military personnel, government officials” and “missionaries”.

“Sale?” said Peter Gibbs, an archivist in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s historic preservation office. “The museum has got it wrong.”

What really occurred is that an “Indian Ring” of agents and politicians were taking bribes from people who wanted to do business on reservations. In 1886, the government hired a bankrupt 52-year-old from New York, LF Spencer, as an Indian agent.

Spencer arrived during hard times at the Rosebud reservation in what is now South Dakota. The US sought to control the tribe by sending its children to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial school in Pennsylvania, where they endured harsh labor and abuse, sometimes leading to their deaths. The government stopped providing rations to parents who refused to give up their children.

Spencer befriended Spotted Tail Jr, son of Chief Spotted Tail, who held some of the tribe’s communal items, including the painted tipi. After Spotted Tail died in 1888, Spencer claimed the chief had signed an undated will giving Spencer many items, including the “great medicine pipe of the Sioux nation”.

Gibbs believes the will is a fraud. The pipe had been handed down to Spotted Tail by his father and his grandfather. “Junior would never have passed this pipe on to Spencer, nor the tipi,” Gibbs said. Spencer’s dishonesty was so well known that the Indian Rights Association urged the army to fire him.

In 1889, Spencer gathered his haul and left. Back in New York, he lectured to parlor clubs about his “wild west” exploits, showing off the tipi and other items.

After Spencer died, his daughter, Harriet Lund, bequeathed some of his spoils to relatives and to an unspecified museum. In 1963, Spencer’s granddaughter Vivian Backen sold Spotted Tail’s will and other items to a Denver art dealer, according to Spencer’s descendant Dick Miller. Correspondence between Backen and the Denver art dealer supports that history.

But the Met’s provenance doesn’t list these names. The art dealer sold a tipi from Spencer’s cache to the Denver Art Museum for $500, or about $5,000 today, even though it had mildew rot and patched holes.

In 1965, a curator at the museum sold the tipi. The Met’s record says the buyer was Larry Frank of New Mexico. After Frank died, the Dikers bought it in 1989. In 2018, they gave it to the Met, where it was displayed in pristine condition.

The Met has described it as a souvenir. But Ben Rhodd, the Rosebud Sioux tribe’s then cultural officer, said it had another purpose entirely. The tipi shows triumphant warriors on horseback, holding up shields that represent their male societies. It was an educational tool meant to instill pride in Lakota children for their relatives’ achievements – and to teach them how to erect a tipi, he said.

“This inaccuracy is the result of a lack of consultation,” Rhodd told ProPublica. “And I think the piece has been looted.”

It’s been five years since the Met accepted this gift, and tribal officials say they still haven’t heard from the museum. The item is no longer on display; the Met said it intends to contact the tribe and file a summary as part of “our ongoing Nagpra work”.

“Nampeyo was the first south-west potter to become recognized by name outside her Hopi community and is renowned for her technical skills and aesthetic sensibility,” states the Met’s website. She was also one of the first Native American women to control her own work by selling directly to buyers.

The Met’s history of the jar is missing dates, but there’s enough documentation to show it was probably obtained legally. It’s an example of a commercial work of art in the Diker collection that is appropriate to display. (In its statement, the Met said it “recognizes the sensitivity of some items in its historical Native American collection” and as a result is prioritizing the acquisition of “more modern and contemporary works by Indigenous artists”.)

In 1874, Nampeyo was a shy 15-year-old who sometimes wore a traditional manta, a type of shawl. A surveyor snapped her picture, which wound up on ads to lure tourists to the Arizona Territory. Unwittingly, Nampeyo became an iconic image of the south-west.

It was a mixed blessing, said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, a former Hopi tribal historic preservation officer. For centuries, the Hopi have lived on remote mesas that tower more than a mile over the surrounding landscape, allowing them to freely practice their language, religion and culture.

In the 1880s, however, a flood of dignitaries, artifact “pickers” and scholars arrived to glimpse the Hopi’s “exotic” culture. Seeing an opportunity, an old soldier from Kit Carson’s Army brigade, Thomas Keam, set up a trading post near the mesas. He plundered graves and ruins for pots and jars to sell.

An ancient Hopi (or Ancestral Pueblo) piece in the Diker Collection – a Socorro black-on-white storage jar made between 1050 and 1100 – was probably looted, according to the late Terry Morgart, a researcher for the Hopi cultural office. The jar’s provenance begins about 800 years after it was made, in 1984, when the Dikers bought it from a gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

“Back in the day, men would loot all the good stuff from a grave and pitch out the human remains,” Morgart said last year. “Then they’d ship it all to the museums.”

The Dikers referred ProPublica to the Met for comment on the bowl.

The museum acknowledged it had not consulted with the Hopi cultural office about the ancient jar when it received it in 2019. In a statement, the museum said: “In 2022, The Met was in communication on several occasions with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office for guidance regarding Hopi items in the collection. Any potential issues with the Socorro pot were not brought to our attention at that time.”

In 1889, Keam sold 3,000 Hopi pieces to the Smithsonian for $10,000 – or $350,000 today. When Keam ran out of plundered pots, he turned to Hopi women, including Nampeyo, to produce them. Her mother was a Tewa, her father a Hopi, and she’d grown up near an abandoned ancient village. Playing with designs, Nampeyo made pots with yellow-orange clay and painted figures on them using black, red and white mineral pigments. Then she polished the surface to a high sheen.

Keam sent some of her pieces to the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Collectors took notice, and Keam sold them her work. According to some scholars, Nampeyo received a fraction of the profits. By the late 1890s, she was selling directly to customers.

An ex-mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison Jr, acquired one of Nampeyo’s works. The burnt-amber pot had a stylized face of a dancing kachina. In the 1930s, Harrison gave the object to his men’s club named the Cliff Dwellers. It sat in the foyer for decades.

The Met’s provenance says the piece was sold in 2010 by Bonhams auction house. Bidding was intense. When the gavel came down, the Dikers had bought it for $350,000, a record for south-west American Indian pottery.

The Dikers gave the jar in 2017 to the Met, where it is currently on display. Since it’s not a sacred or funerary item and was made for commercial use, the museum is not required to file a Nagpra summary.

Midway through the Diker exhibit’s setup and development, the Met hired some advisers. But this group did not have time to contact the appropriate tribal officers, said one of the advisers, Brian Vallo, the then director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and a former governor of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. Vallo stressed that he was not a tribal leader at the time but said it was important to educate the Met “on issues of cultural sensitivities and representation”.

(ProPublica spoke to Vallo several times for this story. The Met also invited the news organization to interview him, describing Vallo as an expert in “Native arts and culture” and “familiar with the field”.)

This advisory group learned the Met didn’t have a procedure for properly curating, consulting, documenting and displaying Native American objects. They insisted that the museum hire an Indigenous curator.

“The Diker collection is quite beautiful, but many of the objects are not well documented,” Vallo said. “There needs to be an informed process that should be followed so the museum doesn’t take in items protected by federal laws, including Nagpra.”

Soon after the Diker exhibit opened at the Met in 2018, O’Loughlin, the Association of American Indian Affairs director, heard complaints about the show from members of her organization. She contacted the curator of the Met’s American wing, Sylvia Yount, hoping to connect her with cultural officers of the tribes that had made the objects in the collection.

“I offered to bring them to New York so they could give their perspective on the display,” O’Loughlin said, but Yount declined.

Yount said publicly that she had consulted with tribal “leaders”. The museum had hired Indigenous and non-Native academics and consultants – advisers who were not chosen by the tribes to represent them, as required by Nagpra.

Of the meeting with O’Loughlin, Yount said in a statement that they had a “productive” session in which they discussed the Met’s “ongoing Nagpra efforts and potential future collaborations.”

As a non-profit with $5.58bn in assets, the Met should have hired the staff needed to provide accurate information about its works years ago, experts said. “It could set an example about the importance of combating illegal trade and the need to protect cultural heritage,” said Tess Davis, director of Antiquities Coalition, which fights cultural trafficking. “But it seems they are doing the opposite.”

Tribal members are skeptical of many museums’ willingness to consult with them. As a result, the Department of the Interior in January announced proposals to improve Nagpra by, among other things, emphasizing that museums should consult with tribes at every step of the process and defer to the customs and knowledge of tribes and their lineal descendants.

When Riley, of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, learned the Met was displaying the quiver set, he grew upset. “I wanted the museum to take it down, but I didn’t know who to ask,” he recalled.

He understood the limits of Nagpra, having been rebuffed in a previous attempt to reclaim “four of our sacred objects” held by another east coast museum. “We had to prove that it belongs to us, that it was stolen and that it should be returned. And the museum didn’t have to prove a thing,” he said.

And those looted masks? In 2002, Sven Haakanson Jr, then director of the Alutiiq Museum, stumbled upon some of his people’s carvings at the Château-Musée de Boulogne-Sur-Mer in Pas-de-Calais. The French looter Pinart had given the masks to the museum a century earlier. Stunned, Haakanson met the facility’s then director and spent the next six years cultivating a relationship with the museum. Finally, in 2008, the French shipped 34 masks to the Aluttiq Museum as a temporary loan.

Haakanson mounted a groundbreaking exhibition. “We wanted people to see that the masks were not only striking, but part of an Alutiiq tradition of sharing 7,000 years of history,” he told ProPublica. The exhibit brought some people to tears. “It helped heal the unspoken wounds of the tribe,” he said.

Now, the Alutiit are relearning how to make masks as their ancestors once did.

Such successes inspire Gibbs and the Rosebud Sioux tribe. “There should be a Cultural Repatriation Day when it’s safe for everybody and anybody who has something to give it back to tribes, no questions asked,” he said.

That includes the Dikers, he said, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American Wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view.

Beatty, an Alaska Native, had worked on a radio documentary about the two Alutiiq objects and how they and others like them had been plundered from tribal land about 150 years ago. Now, the masks were on display in the biggest and most esteemed art museum in the Western Hemisphere. “It was super shocking to me,” she said.

The Met’s ownership history for the masks, also known as provenance, omits more than a century of their whereabouts. Historians say the masks were taken in 1871. But the museum’s timeline doesn’t start until 2003, when the Dikers bought them from a collector. Ownership was transferred to the Met in 2017.

The Dikers, who have amassed one of the most significant private collections of Native American works, have been donating or lending objects to the Met since 1993. In 2017, as other institutions grappled with returning colonial-era spoils, the Met announced the Dikers’ gift of another 91 Native American works.

A ProPublica review of records the museum has posted online found that only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland.”

Experts say a lack of documented histories is a red flag that objects could have been stolen or may be fake.

“That’s a lot of missing documentation, which is a problem,” said Kelley Hays-Gilpin, a curator at the Museum of Northern Arizona. The Arizona museum has documented about 80% of its collection, as has the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions that are considered less prestigious than the Met but that have substantial Native American collections. Some museums, such as one at the University of Denver, decline gifts that have poor provenance.

For centuries, Native Americans have decried the looting of the graves of their ancestors by pothunters and scientists and the display of their remains and belongings in museums. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to facilitate the return of such items and human remains to the appropriate tribes, which the law declares are their rightful owners.

NAGPRA requires federally funded museums to notify a tribe within six months of receiving their holdings by contacting and consulting with that tribe’s chosen representative, often known as a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, and giving them an opportunity to reclaim their objects. The law also mandates that museums file a copy of those notices with the National Park Service.

These interactions provide an opportunity for institutions to learn more about the history of objects, whether they are authentic or might have been stolen and if it’s appropriate to display them. But as ProPublica has reported this year, museums have often delayed such discussions while keeping human remains and objects that the law says should be returned.

Some pieces in the Diker Collection are sacred, such as a shaman’s rattle made of human or horse hair; some are funereal and were buried with the dead. (The Met recently returned the rattle to the Dikers, and there are “ongoing consultations” related to some other items, according to the museum.)

“Most of these items could only have ended up in private hands through trafficking and looting,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, which advocates for tribal sovereignty and the protection of Native American cultures.

“The way that so many of these things wound up in museums is horrible,” said Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage and a Tlingit citizen. New York law goes by the principle of once stolen, always stolen, and she said the pieces are tainted. “The rightful thing is for these things to be returned home.”

Initially, many of the objects were loans; due to a loophole in NAGPRA, this meant the museum did not have to report them to tribes or to the NPS. To date, the museum has accepted the transfer of 77 of the promised gifts from the Diker Collection, according to the Met.

But ProPublica found that after assuming ownership the Met for years failed to consult the necessary tribal officials in a timely and consistent manner about objects in its collections. A year passed before the museum contacted someone at the Alutiiq tribe to inform them that it had their masks. (The Met declined to name the person it contacted.) Four years later, the NPS posted summaries that the Met had sent in September 2022 to 63 tribes connected to objects in the Diker Collection. The Met did so after ProPublica asked the museum about the masks and other sacred and culturally sensitive items.

All the while, the museum displayed some items with incorrect descriptions and omitted or minimized the wars, occupations, massacres and exploitation that dominated the tribes’ past.

The Met’s descriptions in its displays “are in the land of make-believe,” said Wendy Teeter, the former curator at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The public won’t have a clue as to what a piece really is or how it got there.” This, Teeter said, “perpetuates stereotypes and bias against Native people.”

Dan Monroe, who helped draft NAGPRA and is a former director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said the long delays in notifying tribal representatives and the NPS are a violation of the law: “They have a responsibility to follow the law and are subject to fines if they don’t.”

In a written statement, the museum said: “Although some progress has been made in updating the online catalog information and providing more complete provenance information, we recognize there is still much work to do and that this is an ongoing process that requires relationship building, patience, and great care. This is important work, and it is precisely one of the intentions of the Dikers to have a large, well-resourced institution such as The Met devote the time and scholarship to these Native items.”

The museum also stated that it is misleading to use “complete ownership histories as a standard for judging a collection,” noting that much of the Diker collection has previously been exhibited and researched by other major U.S. museums. “When new information about collection items comes to light, we openly share it (if advised by Indigenous leaders to do so), or remove culturally sensitive items from view as requested.”

During its investigation, ProPublica asked the Met to comment on statements about the collection. Some sources who had made on-the-record statements that were shared with the museum by ProPublica later asked to withdraw their statements. One indicated that they’d been contacted by a Met employee. (The Met said it constantly engages with a wide range of professionals and did not exert any pressure on sources for this story.)

The Dikers declined interview requests. In a written statement to ProPublica, they said: “For nearly 50 years, inspiring appreciation for the arts of Native America has been our greatest passion.” The couple also said that they had assessed “all available information relating to provenance” before acquiring the works.

If a museum can prove it has legal title, meaning that the object’s creator, their descendents or a tribal representative willingly transferred the piece, the museum doesn’t have to return an item. But if a tribal officer requests the return of an item, a museum must comply, unless it can prove it’s part of the chain of ownership, ideally going back to its origin. Complicating matters, thousands of Native American pieces at the Met have been in its collection since 1889, an era when many museums didn’t track the ownership histories of such works.

Questions about the legitimacy of the Met’s ownership of artwork extend beyond its American Wing. As part of a sweeping investigation into the trafficking of antiquities, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office has issued nine warrants over the past five years to seize about three dozen looted artifacts at the Met, as well as computers, memos and other material related to the objects.

Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan who leads the office’s antiquities trafficking unit, said he and his team found the sales histories of the seized antiquities were either fraudulent, incomplete or nonexistent. The D.A.’s office looked at filing charges for criminal possession of stolen property. “But their actions didn’t cross the threshold of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’” Bogdanos told ProPublica, so no charges were filed.

The Met said in its statement that it drafted a new Native American Arts Initiative in 2021 under the guidance of its “first-ever” curator of Native American Art Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha, an indigenous community in Mexico). The initiative, said the museum, includes “creating an advisory committee and hiring a full-time staff position that will collaboratively focus on NAGPRA responsibilities and further prioritize the building of ongoing partnerships as well as the strengthening of community collaborations.” In March, the Met said it was also hiring a Native American art researcher whose responsibilities will include “some provenance research.”

What follows are the stories behind several Indigenous pieces that the Dikers have loaned or given to the Met. ProPublica interviewed experts and cultural officers at the affiliated tribes to learn how some of the Diker Collection objects survived brutality, theft and exploitation, little of which the visitors who pay to see them learn about from the museum.

The two carved masks that Beatty was shocked to see at the exhibit’s opening still hang in the museum. A description of them on the Met’s website says that “spirits communicate with people through whistling: these masks may be the faces of such supernatural beings.”

They may be sacred. But that’s only part of the story.

The Alutiit have lived on the Aleutian Islands in southwest Alaska for 7,500 years. In winter, people would once huddle indoors and create utensils, clothes and ceremonial objects. Using beaver-tooth tools, they would carve wood faces, painting them blue, green and red and adorning them with feathers and fur.

At a preordained time, the Alutiit would don their masks and dance and sing in ritual, said April G.L. Counceller, director of the Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository in Kodiak, Alaska. A lot of the masks’ power was tied to those who had passed, she said: “For other ceremonies, the masks were a way to communicate with spirit helpers.” After the ceremony, people would hide the masks in caves to let the “sky creatures” rest until the next rite.

In 1740, Russians invaded the area for its sea otter fur. They forced Alutiiq males as young as 12 to hunt and held Alutiiq women as ransom. People died of starvation, disease and abuse. After a century, the sea otter population had nearly collapsed, and the Russians left. The U.S. then arrived and set up schools that punished Native children for speaking their language. By the 1890s, the population of the Alutiit had dropped by 90% to 1,500.

Museums rushed to grab what was left of Alaskan cultures. When a Western Union expedition headed north, the Smithsonian Institution’s assistant manager, Spencer Baird, made sure that 20-year-old William Dall was on board to “salvage” tribal objects. Baird paid Dall $200 a year ($7,000 in today’s dollars) to ship his hoard to the museum. Baird also used “salvagers” on Army expeditions, Navy cutters and other quests, acquiring tens of thousands of pieces. The Met obtained Tsimshian rattles and Tlingit reed pipes from donors around this time.

“Almost everything that wasn’t nailed down or hidden was taken away,” said Worl, the Sealaska Heritage president.

The Met said it has provided “updated summaries to Alaskan Native communities” and “the Tsimshian and other Northwest Coast communities are on our list to receive new collection NAGPRA summaries.”

In 1871, 19-year-old Alphonse Pinart of France arrived. He spent months paddling a skin-covered kayak along the 600-mile Kodiak archipelago, stopping at islands where he found caves. Inside those caves, Pinart unearthed graves and helped himself to human remains, funeral items and masks, according to his journals.

That November, he stayed on Kodiak Island and learned the masks were used in Alutiiq rituals; he got to watch some ceremonies and published a paper about his findings.

After six months, he shipped the masks home to Pas-de-Calais and left. Before he died in 1911, he donated 87 artifacts to a small museum in a castle near Calais. They sat forgotten by the Alutiit for seven generations.

The Met’s provenance only lists owners from the past 20 years. The Dikers purchased the two masks in 2003 and donated them to the Met in 2017. The museum filed a summary with the NPS listing them in 2022, five years after the deadline.

The museum stated that in 2023, “it was recommended that the masks remain on view to provide community access.” Tribal members who live where the masks were made must travel 3,500 miles to reach the New York museum.

In 2019, the Met displayed this bag of arrows with a placard reading: “The painted and beaded patterns on this quiver symbolizes protective sacred powers.”

This description indicates the object is holy and, out of respect, should not be displayed, said Ramon Riley, the cultural resource and NAGPRA representative for the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona. “But I need to see the documents showing how they escaped from their home,” he said, meaning their provenance.

The Met lists no such history. And because the Dikers loaned the quiver set to the Met in 2017 and didn’t transfer title to the museum, the Met wasn’t required to inform tribes that it possessed the item.

For the Met to list the piece merely as “Apache” shows a lack of due diligence, as there are more than 10 Apache tribes. If Met curators had contacted any of those tribes, they might have learned which group created the items. These pieces have a history that should be respected, said Riley: “The set could have been looted or taken at gunpoint.”

In the 1870s, one of the more ruthless leaders in U.S. military history, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, was pursuing the Apaches. During the Civil War, he had burned Atlanta. As commanding general of the Army and director of the Indian Wars, he was using similar scorched-earth methods, including devising the slaughter of 5 million buffalo to starve Native Americans.

At the time, the U.S. was planning its first world’s fair: the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. The Smithsonian was asked to create an Indian “artifact” gallery to rival the antiquities in European museums.

In 1873, the Smithsonian’s director, Joseph Henry, wrote Sherman: “We are desirous of procuring large numbers” of Native American “dress, ornament, weapons.” He asked Sherman to tell his soldiers to send “specimens” from the battlefield. At Sherman’s request, Henry paid each uniformed “picker” up to $500 (the equivalent of $14,000 today).

The plan helped produce one of the fair’s more popular exhibits, which included Apache arrows. When the expo closed, Henry’s deputy packedthe collection onto 48 rail cars bound for Washington, D.C.

By 1878, the demand for “Indian” items had grown so large that the Smithsonian asked the public to unearth “American Aboriginal” artifacts from mounds, caves and cemeteries. Soon, the spoils of war and grave robbing filled America’s new museums like the Met, but few items had documentation or provenance.

Riley learned this while searching for the remains of his clan relative. His ancestor worked as an Army scout, carrying a government-issued rifle and his own bow and arrows. But during a massacre he was arrested for mutiny and hung, said Riley. The scout was buried with his possessions. Days later, his body was dug up and displayed in a cabinet inside Fort Grant, in what was then the Arizona Territory. Eventually, his remains were shipped to the Smithsonian.

Riley doesn’t think his relative’s quiver set was displayed by the Met; he believes that the set in the Diker Collection is a funerary item. “But to people like the Dikers, it’s all art,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

In March, after ProPublica had asked about it, the Met said it had been made aware that the quiver-and-arrow set was “potentially culturally sensitive” and had removed it from public display. The loaned item has not yet been returned to the Dikers.

When the Met displayed this item in 2019, the placard read: “During early reservation life, Plains people created objects such as this for sale to visiting military personnel, government officials” and “missionaries.”

“Sale?” said Peter Gibbs, an archivist in the Rosebud Sioux tribe’s historic preservation office. “The museum has got it wrong.”

What really occurred is that an “Indian Ring” of agents and politicians were taking bribes from people who wanted to do business on reservations. In 1886, the government hired a bankrupt 52-year-old from New York, L.F. Spencer, as an Indian agent.

Spencer arrived during hard times at the Rosebud reservation in what is now South Dakota. The U.S. sought to control the tribe by sending its children to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where they endured harsh labor and abuse, sometimes leading to their death. The government stopped providing rations to parents who refused to give up their children.

Spencer befriended Spotted Tail Jr., son of Chief Spotted Tail, who held some of the tribe’s communal items, including the painted tipi. After Spotted Tail died in 1888, Spencer claimed the chief had signed an undated will giving Spencer many items, including the “great medicine pipe of the Sioux nation.”

Gibbs believes the will is a fraud. The pipe had been handed down to Spotted Tail by his father and his grandfather. “Junior would never have passed this pipe on to Spencer, nor the tipi,” Gibbs said. Spencer’s dishonesty was so well known that the Indian Rights Association urged the Army to fire him.

In 1889, Spencer gathered his haul and left. Back in New York, he lectured to parlor clubs about his “Wild West” exploits, showing off the tipi and other items.

After Spencer died, his daughter, Harriet Lund, bequeathed some of his spoils to relatives and to an unspecified museum. In 1963, Spencer’s granddaughter Vivian Backen sold Spotted Tail’s will and other items to a Denver art dealer, according to Spencer’s descendant Dick Miller. Correspondence between Backen and the Denver art dealer supports that history.

But the Met’s provenance doesn’t list these names. The art dealer sold a tipi from Spencer’s cache to the Denver Art Museum for $500, or about $5,000 today, even though it had mildew rot and patched holes.

In 1965, a curator at the museum sold the tipi. The Met’s record says the buyer was Larry Frank of New Mexico. After Frank died, the Dikers bought it in 1989. In 2018, they gave it to the Met, where it was displayed in pristine condition.

The Met has described it as a souvenir. But Ben Rhodd, the Rosebud Sioux tribe’s then-cultural officer, said it had another purpose entirely. The tipi shows triumphant warriors on horseback, holding up shields that represent their male societies. It was an educational tool meant to instill pride in Lakota children for their relatives’ achievements — and to teach them how to erect a tipi, he said.

“This inaccuracy is the result of a lack of consultation,” Rhodd told ProPublica. “And I think the piece has been looted.”

It’s been five years since the Met accepted this gift, and tribal officials say they still haven’t heard from the museum. The item is no longer on display; the Met said it intends to contact the tribe and file a summary as part of “our ongoing NAGPRA work.”

“Nampeyo was the first Southwest potter to become recognized by name outside her Hopi community and is renowned for her technical skills and aesthetic sensibility,” states the Met’s website. She was also one of the first Native American women to control her own work by selling directly to buyers.

The Met’s history of the jar is missing dates, but there’s enough documentation to show it was probably obtained legally. It’s an example of a commercial work of art in the Diker Collection that is appropriate to display. (In its statement, the Met said it “recognizes the sensitivity of some items in its historical Native American collection” and as a result is prioritizing the acquisition of “more modern and contemporary works by Indigenous artists.”)

In 1874, Nampeyo was a shy 15-year-old who sometimes wore a traditional manta, a type of shawl. A surveyor snapped her picture, which wound up on ads to lure tourists to the Arizona Territory. Unwittingly, Nampeyo became an iconic image of the Southwest.

It was a mixed blessing, said Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, a former Hopi Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. For centuries, the Hopi have lived on remote mesas that tower more than a mile over the surrounding landscape, allowing them to freely practice their language, religion and culture.

In the 1880s, however, a flood of dignitaries, artifact “pickers” and scholars arrived to glimpse the Hopi’s “exotic” culture. Seeing an opportunity, an old soldier from Kit Carson’s Army brigade, Thomas Keam, set up a trading post near the mesas. He plundered graves and ruins for pots and jars to sell.

In 1889, Keam sold 3,000 Hopi pieces to the Smithsonian for $10,000 — or $350,000 today. When Keam ran out of plundered pots, he turned to Hopi women, including Nampeyo, to produce them. Her mother was a Tewa, her father a Hopi, and she’d grown up near an abandoned ancient village. Playing with designs, Nampeyo made pots with yellow-orange clay and painted figures on them using black, red and white mineral pigments. Then, she polished the surface to a high sheen.

Keam sent some of her pieces to the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Collectors took notice, and Keam sold them her work. According to some scholars, Nampeyo received a fraction of the profits. By the late 1890s, she was selling directly to customers.

An ex-mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison Jr., acquired one of Nampeyo’s works. The burnt-amber pot had a stylized face of a dancing kachina. In the 1930s, Harrison gave the object to his men’s club named the Cliff Dwellers. It sat in the foyer for decades.

The Met’s provenance says the piece was sold in 2010 by Bonhams auction house. Bidding was intense. When the gavel came down, the Dikers had bought it for $350,000, a record for Southwest American Indian pottery.

The Dikers gave the jar in 2017 to the Met, where it is currently on display. Since it’s not a sacred or funerary item and was made for commercial use, the museum is not required to file a NAGPRA summary.

“The Objects are Not Well Documented”

Midway through the Diker exhibit’s setup and development, the Met hired some advisers. But this group did not have time to contact the appropriate tribal officers, said one of the advisers, Brian Vallo, the then-director of the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and a former governor of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. Vallo stressed that he was not a tribal leader at the time but said it was important to educate the Met “on issues of cultural sensitivities and representation.”

(ProPublica spoke to Vallo several times for this story. The Met also invited the news organization to interview him, describing Vallo as an expert in “Native arts and culture” and “familiar with the field.”)

This advisory group learned the Met didn’t have a procedure for properly curating, consulting, documenting and displaying Native American objects. They insisted that the museum hire an indigenous curator.

“The Diker collection is quite beautiful, but many of the objects are not well documented.,” Vallo said. “There needs to be an informed process that should be followed so the museum doesn’t take in items protected by federal laws, including NAGPRA.”

Soon after the Diker exhibit opened at the Met in 2018, O’Loughlin, the Association of American Indian Affairs director, heard complaints about the show from members of her organization. She contacted the curator of the Met’s American Wing, Sylvia Yount, hoping to connect her with cultural officers of the tribes that had made the objects in the collection.

“I offered to bring them to New York so they could give their perspective on the display,” O’Loughlin said, but Yount declined.

Yount said publicly that she had consulted with tribal “leaders.” The museum had hired Indigenous and nonnative academics and consultants — advisers who were not chosen by the tribes to represent them, as required by NAGPRA.

Of the meeting with O’Loughlin, Yount said in a statement that they had a “productive” session in which they discussed the Met’s “ongoing NAGPRA efforts and potential future collaborations.”

As a nonprofit with $5.58 billion in assets, the Met should have hired the staff needed to provide accurate information about its works years ago, experts said. “It could set an example about the importance of combating illegal trade and the need to protect cultural heritage,” said Tess Davis, director of Antiquities Coalition, which fights cultural trafficking. “But it seems they are doing the opposite.”

Tribal members are skeptical of many museums’ willingness to consult with them. As a result, the Department of Interior in January announced proposals to improve NAGPRA by, among other things, emphasizing that museums consult with tribes at every step of the process and defer to the customs and knowledge of tribes and their lineal descendants.

When Riley, of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, learned the Met was displaying the quiver set, he grew upset. “I wanted the museum to take it down, but I didn’t know who to ask,” he recalled.

He understood the limits of NAGPRA, having been rebuffed in a previous attempt to reclaim “four of our sacred objects” held by another East Coast museum. “We had to prove that it belongs to us, that it was stolen and that it should be returned. And the museum didn’t have to prove a thing,” he said.

And those looted masks? In 2002, Sven Haakanson Jr., then-director of the Alutiiq Museum, stumbled upon some of his people’s carvings at the Château-Musée de Boulogne-Sur-Mer in Pas-de-Calais. The French looter Pinart had given the masks to the museum a century earlier. Stunned, Haakanson met the facility’s then-director and spent the next six years cultivating a relationship with the museum. Finally, in 2008 the French shipped 34 masks to the Aluttiq Museum as a temporary loan.

Haakanson mounted a groundbreaking exhibition. “We wanted people to see that the masks were not only striking, but part of an Alutiiq tradition of sharing 7,000 years of history,” he told ProPublica. The exhibit brought some people to tears. “It helped heal the unspoken wounds of the tribe,” he said.

Now, the Alutiit are relearning how to make masks as their ancestors once did.

Such successes inspire Gibbs and the Rosebud Sioux tribe. “There should be a Cultural Repatriation Day when it’s safe for everybody and anybody who has something to give it back to tribes, no questions asked,” he said.

That includes the Dikers, he said, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At first glance, artist Steven J. Yazzie’s photograph “Canyon” looks like a normal aerial shot of a desert slot canyon – the bright, sun-washed landscape contrasting with the deep shadow of the narrow ravine. 

Closer scrutiny of the image, however, reveals that the darkness of the canyon is not the natural shadow one might expect in a documentary photograph; rather, it is sprinkled with stars set against a black backdrop. By looking down into the Earth, the viewer is also looking up and out into the universe. 

Yazzie, who now lives in Denver but spent much if his childhood in the Page area, created the image by taking a still shot from an aerial video he had made of a slot canyon and combining it with a photograph of the night sky.

“The placement of the starry sky and the land become a juxtaposition between the vastness of the natural world and the infinite expanse of the cosmos,” Yazzie explained. “The darkness of the canyon shadows creates a natural frame for the starry sky, as if the land is a canvas on which the stars are painted. This contrast of light and dark, earth and sky, reminds us of the interplay of opposing forces in the universe, and the beauty that can arise from their interaction.”

In an interview with the Chronicle, Yazzie said his image also presents a different way of seeing slot canyons – that is, peering into darkness rather than focusing on the beans of light that figure so prominently in the countless photographs of Antelope Canyon reproduced on posters and shared on social media.

And while many “nature” photographers take great pains to eliminate all traces of human interference, Yazzie keeps them intact. 

“There are echoes of our human experience in the land. I think there’s a box or something in the canyon photo that I found while I was editing, and I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta keep that in there,” he said.

Another one of Yazzie’s photographs explores the subtext of human experience in a different way: “Throwing Stars Over Monsters” is a night image of the New Mexico landmark Shiprock – known as Tsé Bitʼaʼí in Navajo, which translates as “rock with wings” or “winged rock.”

While Shiprock is a prominent feature of the photograph, much of the image is taken up by the starry sky over the landscape. Yazzie said that the image on its own is pretty straightforward, but he hopes people will read the title, go deeper and consider the subtext to the image. 

The idea of “throwing stars” is connected to a story about the Navajo folk figure Coyote, who became bored watching the other gods slowly placing the stars in the sky one at a time. Impatient, Coyote picked up the bag containing the remaining stars and threw it into the sky, creating the Milky Way with one swift gesture.

“One view of the story can be understood as metaphor of chaos to beauty, or perhaps creativity and resourcefulness. I also see Coyote’s actions as a form of immediacy and speed of time towards the spectacular, a form of what technology can bring,” Yazzie wrote about the photograph.

He also told the Chronicle, “Sure, it’s an image of Shiprock, but it’s also because I’m not focusing just on the rock itself, it’s sized down a little bit so that the sky is present. I’m hoping that these visual cues will echo that kind of reference to mythology or story or land. People hopefully will take that away from the work.”

“Throwing Stars Over Monsters” is one of several photographs by Yazzie now on display in a temporary exhibition at Amangiri just north of Page. “Canyon” is also there, displayed in both color and black-and-white versions. 

The Amangiri exhibition, which runs until May 31, is the result of a collaboration between the resort and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. 

Audrey Huttert, the general manager of Amangiri, said the idea for the exhibition came about late last year when resort management decided they wanted to give their small gallery space “a little bit more life and try to find new ways of exhibiting some of the fantastic work of our area.” Seeking an arts institution with a “similar level of excellence” as Amangiri, they reached out to the Heard Museum with the idea of collaborating on a pop-up exhibition. 

“They were extremely welcoming in terms of the idea we had in mind,” Huttert said. “They were also quite unfamiliar with Amangiri, so we invited them over because we wanted them to see it with their own eyes what a spectacular location this is.”

Amangiri rests on 900 acres of land in southern Utah, among monumental, starkly beautiful rock formations for which the region is world famous. With very little light pollution invading the resort’s property, one of the key experiences that guests enjoy is stargazing on dark nights.

 It just so happened that the Heard was launching an exhibition titled “Substance of Stars,” described by the museum as “a multi-sensory experience that presents historic and contemporary works focused on the creation stories and sky knowledge of four Indigenous communities.”

Among the four represented communities is the Diné (Navajo), whose homeland, Dinétah, is located near Amangiri and extends across the states of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. And among the artists participating in the “Substance of Stars” exhibition was Steven J. Yazzie.

“Steven Yazzie’s name came up, which was great because apparently he spent his childhood days in this area, so it’s kind of home also for him,” Huttert said. “So, we thought, let’s connect with Steven and see if he would be keen on putting some works forward. He was overly excited about the idea, so it worked out beautifully.”

Yazzie has been working with the Heard Museum since 1999, when he won a grant to paint a mural there on the forced relocation and removal of Indigenous people in the Southwest. Since then, he’s worked in different capacities with the museum – as an exhibiting artist, a video producer for some of their marketing and fundraising content, and a consultant with some of their community outreach work.

Yazzie said the type of work he was doing with video fit well the “Substance of Stars” exhibition, so he was selected as one of four Indigenous artists to produce video content for the immersive gallery experience. 

“The exhibition is really focused on our relationship collectively as Indigenous people with the stars and the cosmos and the sky,” he said, adding that he was happy to be contacted by Amangiri about doing a temporary exhibition connected with “Substance of Stars.” 

“I’m happy to help in that way because, for me, it also helps to share work about our land and our places that we come from as Native people, and my work is really a meditation on that,” Yazzie said.

The images in display at Amangiri are the beginning of a video and photography series that Yazzie had just happened to be developing in relation to the “Substance of Starts” exhibit.

“I was already in the process of creating some new work, so the timing was right, and the fit was right, and it fit the type of small satellite exhibition Amangiri was looking to do,” Yazzie said.

The photos and video footage were collected over the course of a couple of months that Yazzie spent travelling back to the Navajo Reservation and areas that he had grown up around, including LeChee, Page and Marble Canyon.

Born in Newport Beach, California, Yazzie moved with his family to Black Mesa when he was 3 years old, after his father, who is Navajo, got a job working at Peabody Energy. Yazzie attended kindergarten in Kayenta, but then the family moved to LeChee. He attended school in Page from first grade until the end of his freshman year in high school.

Yazzie didn’t become interested in art until he was in his mid-20s, after he had spent 1988 to 1992 in the Marine Corps – including participating in the Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations in Kuwait and Iraq. 

“I started primarily as a painter in the mid-90s. I just kind of fell into it, as a way of therapy or meditation after my Marine Corps experience, or just a way of finding myself as a young person,” Yazzie told the Chronicle.

For years, he mostly focused on painting, but in his mid-30s he started experimenting with video, including video installation and short-form documentary work. He also began collaborating with other artists and moving into more conceptual practices. Photography became a natural extension of that work.

“I wouldn’t consider myself really a photographer but more of a conceptual artist when it comes to photography,” he said, adding, “I’m multidisciplinary in the sense that I work in a lot of different media – painting, installation, video and now photography.” 

He describes his early work as the “archives of myself” and very personal – portraits and other figurative paintings that explored ideas and experiences that had occurred in his past.

It was only over time that influences from his family history and Native culture started showing up in his artwork. At one point, he painted a portrait of his grandfather, Lemuel B. Yazzie, who was a renowned Navajo Code Talker during World War II.  

Yazzie studied fine arts at Arizona State University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He cofounded Digital Preserve, a digital film production project that prioritizes collaborative production work with Indigenous communities, arts and cultural institutions, non-profit organizations and creative agencies. Yazzie was also a founding member of the Indigenous arts collective Postcommodity.

In addition to the Heard Museum, he has exhibited in numerous national and international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, as well as the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson Museum of Art, and the Museum of Northern Arizona. 

Yazzie said that in the most direct way, his art is about “trying to connect people to the visuality of our landscape and of our place and the place that they’re visiting, and just hoping that people take away something meaningful from it.”

He said he was grateful to the Heard Museum and Amangiri for inviting him to exhibit at the resort and “representing and helping connect the museum with a different audience and also having the opportunity to show work that represents our Indigenous lands and stories in a small way.”

Huttert described the Yazzie exhibition at Amangiri as an “experiment,” and said it was nice to see all the key players move forward without hesitation and say, “OK, let’s make this work.”

“The primary purpose behind this was to give something more, to put forward a little bit more of the talent that comes with destinations like this. There are many possibilities to showcase the beauty of the land,” she said. “When we describe this land as being ‘otherworldly,’ one thing is saying it, one thing is demonstrating it, seeing it with your own eyes.”

Like Yazzie, Huttert hopes the exhibition will enhance the guests’ experience by prompting them to connect more deeply with the resort’s surroundings.  

“Aman is the Sanskrit word for ‘peace,’ so obviously the environment we offer is a peaceful one. It’s one of really reconnecting with the earth beneath you, embrace the land and the environment as much as you can,” she said. 

Stretching six miles from the bottom to the top of St Louis, and featuring 30 brand new art commissions, along with guided tours, workshops and school field trips, the second Counterpublic art triennial is a vast undertaking that aims to grapple with some sizable questions and redress historical wrongs.

“It was an exciting challenge,” said James McAnally, co-founder of Counterpublic. “In St Louis, the threads of change loom really large, and seeing that grassroots energy of this city, it sparked a lot of excitement. St Louis is really ripe for this kind of boundary-pushing.”

Inaugurated in 2019, Counterpublic aims to be a regular reckoning with many of the questions that underlie St Louis’s – and by extension America’s – history. The first Counterpublic placed itself deep into the St Louis community, operating in neighborhood sites like a tea shop, yoga studio, punk club, convenience store, Buddhist temple and Mexican panadería. It was lauded both for seamlessly fusing its art interventions into the local cultures of its sites and for its steadfast dedication to community engagement. “It’s a really unique experience, to see that density and range of newly commissioned artworks,” said McAnally.

For the second Counterpublic, running through 15 July, McAnally, and the numerous curators who have worked alongside him on this huge project, placed a high value on a continued public focus. “The planning started with a process of listening – a year-long community engagement process where we met with some 800 people living in the neighborhoods. We asked these people what was important to them. What we heard really informed the exhibition – we heard a lot about public memory, people feeling like the histories of their own neighborhood were not being presented and seen. There was also a lot about reckoning around monuments nationwide, and just thinking about where is history held, where is it kept.”

Counterpublic’s ambitions are to get outside of the traditional structures of the art world and to exhibit in spaces that feel crucial to diverse communities. Its goals to bring new forms of relevance to art are well-stated in the show’s catalog, where McAnally offers these passionate words. “This is an exhibition emerging from frustration at the limitations of an anemic art world met with concrete possibilities for more liveable worlds experienced in grassroots organizing in St Louis, as well as a deep care for a place I have committed much of my adult life to seeing flourish, despite witnessing its legacies of harm, fragmentation, and structural inequities firsthand. In envisioning the exhibition, I aimed for something altogether different – a triennial that allied itself with generational, cultural, economic, and civic change; a post-pandemic, post-uprising exhibition demanding that we, as arts workers and artists, do more to repair our broken world.”

One act of reckoning with history that headlines Counterpublic are efforts to rematriate the last remaining historic mound of the Osage Nation. One of numerous such sacred sites constructed by the Osage between 800 and 1450 AD, this last mound now sits on a quiet residential street beneath two homes.

Although the Osage Nation did purchase roughly one-third of the mound in 2008, McAnally shared that this was not enough to permit the kind of preservation and archaeological work that such a site requires. As a part of Counterpublic, McAnally and his colleagues have made formal offers to transfer the two homes currently sitting on the mound. “As a longtime resident of St Louis, I’ve been aware of this mound and the larger history of dozens of mounds that have been destroyed. It was a site that I passed by weekly. It keeps the work quite grounded because it’s in service to something larger than a three-month exhibition.”

As a part of Counterpublic, the “public secret society” New Red Order, which has presented art installations nationwide in an effort to reimagine futures for Native American peoples, will screen a video documenting legal efforts to rematriate the mound. An accompanying art installation by the Osage artist Anita Fields will surround the mound, and in an adjoining neighborhood, the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will display an enormous map painting interfacing with streets named for Indigenous tribes and leaders and their intersections with streets named for American states.

Opposite the Osage mound, at Counterpublic’s other end, stands the Griot Museum of Black History, a 25-year-old community museum which McAnally was drawn to because it is so deeply rooted in the neighborhood. “It’s holding all these Black histories of St Louis. With this site, the question was how to build capacity. They wanted something permanent and public that really celebrated their place in the city.” With these goals in mind, Counterpublic commissioned prominent Black architect David Adjaye to create his first-ever permanent public artwork – a massive earthwork that will take shape over the course of Counterpublic and that will come with its own two-year fellowship at the Griot museum in order to conserve and contextualize the piece. “The David Adjaye piece is being built in public, on site. He’s bringing this traditional African building process and constructing it in public view, and I think that’s a really exciting invitation for people.

Other Counterpublic works will be more ephemeral. For instance, the Nigerian-American musicians Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Slow Drag will comprise dozens of cars slowly navigating through St Louis while playing various remixes of an original piece. “They’re really thinking about the distribution of sound and immersiveness throughout place. I’ve never heard anything like it, I’ve never experienced anything like it – it’ll be exciting to get to experience it for the first time alongside everybody else.” Elsewhere, the Native American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger offers an augmented reality piece – “it will hover in the St Louis landscape and will be visible throughout the exhibition footprint, figures dancing along the horizon line of the city.”

Counterpublic’s goal is to think on long-term timescales and to imagine futures that do not currently exist in the public’s mind. “I like that it’s art going beyond itself,” said McAnally. It brings something concrete and focused to be thinking generationally. Our goal is to reimagine civic infrastructures toward generational change.”

A big part of this generational thinking is reckoning with St Louis’s place in American history, and how it is uniquely poised to think through questions of national historic wrongs. “St Louis is situated right in the center of the US – in the 18th century it was even proposed as the nation’s capital, as this hinge between the east and the west. We’re interested in the ways it has been an epicenter of American culture and development in both good and bad. St Louis’s possibilities and issues are really American possibilities and issues. It poses fundamentally American questions. We are really trying to think through a lens of healing and repair. We are really intending to try to do something new.”

• Counterpublic 2023 is running in and around St Louis until 15 July