Turtle Talk

Here is the article “Indian Family Sees Its History in a Shirt.”

An excerpt:

Cultural property claims can be complex: The competing interests of good-faith collectors and plundered civilizations have to be adjudicated among complications like the passage of time, the disappearance of records and the evolution of law.

Douglas Diehl, director of the American Indian and ethnographic art department at the auction house, would not discuss the matter when reached by phone, but released a statement saying that Skinner “is committed to the highest standards of research and due diligence” and is “particularly sensitive to Native American artifacts.”

The collector who consigned the item for sale, Charles E. Derby, said that he had good title to the shirt. He bought it, according to his lawyer, William H. Fry, from another collector in the early 1980s and has a bill of sale. Mr. Fry said his client could track the shirt, which has been shown in museums, back to 1955, when it was displayed, and later sold, by a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass.

A lawyer for the Little Thunder family, Robert P. Gough, said that a collector would need a lengthier provenance for the shirt to claim good title.