SANTA ANA PUEBLO, N.M. – A case file from decades ago tells the story of a medium-sized bowl made at Santa Ana Pueblo more than a hundred years ago. Carefully passed down through generations, this bowl, decorated with dark red triangles, was traditionally used for bread-making.

Among nearly 150 artifacts stolen from this Native American community’s ceremonial village during a string of burglaries since the summer of 1984, the bowl was included. Stolen items also comprised war shields, traditional garments, moccasins, willow baskets, and woven rugs, all of which could command high prices due to their rarity.

Eventually, Federal authorities and tribal police in New Mexico apprehended the criminals. Pleas were recorded, penalties enforced, and the case was marked closed. However, for unknown reasons, efforts to retrieve the stolen valuables were never pursued.

Now, experts in historic preservation and repatriation from the pueblo are collaborating with a tribal conservation officer, previously a leading officer at the federal Bureau of Land Management, to solve this cold case, recovering one irreplaceable artifact at a time.

Little to go on

Picking up the trail has not been simple. Memories fade, and digging up old documents is a monumental task.

Assistance has come from case files provided by the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, but essential evidence is missing, such as Polaroid photos seized during a suspect’s house search. Original reports are scant in their descriptions of the stolen treasures, making the recovery task more challenging.

The team has devoted months to scouring auction catalogs, gallery sites, and even Pinterest and Instagram. One northern New Mexico antiquities dealer unknowingly bought some items years ago. The breakthrough arrived when his family disclosed his ledgers that detailed what he acquired and sold.

The investigators started to connect dots, tracing the journey of the bowl across four decades through sales records, interviews and an out-of-print Santa Fe gallery publication. The most recent purchasers returned the bowl after learning its story.

Family members gathered this summer inside the tribal council room to be reunited with an heirloom they thought they would never see again. The bowl was sitting on the table; it was real. Disbelief gave way to tears.

Pueblo Gov. Myron Armijo described the moment as wonderful but emotional. For pueblo people, a sacred item is like another person — living, breathing and intertwined with their identity.

“You can’t put a dollar amount on what was taken,” said Armijo, whose family home was among those burglarized 40 years ago. “They were taking war shields, drums, pottery and many other items that meant so much to our community. It just really hurt the pueblo.”

Under cover of darkness

The first burglary happened in early August 1984, about a week after the pueblo northwest of Albuquerque celebrated a feast day, a rare occasion when outsiders are welcomed inside to watch traditional dances and share food.

According to case files and court records, the thieves treaded stealthily through desert scrub and sandy washes at night to the secluded pueblo at the edge of the Jemez Mountains.

Over 10 months, the thieves targeted homes and traditional society houses in the village that had been added to the national list of historic places a decade earlier.

“Picture these guys stealing blankets, filling them up with pots, everything they could carry,” said William Woody, the conservation officer helping with the investigation.

As the thieves fled, they dropped some items along the road. A rancher found other artifacts that had been stashed in the desert to be recovered later.

A nighttime sting ended the scheme in May 1985. Court records identify an Albuquerque antiquities dealer as the ringleader and some of the hired hands as members of Laguna Pueblo, another Native American community west of Albuquerque.

Federal investigations found other New Mexico pueblos were also targeted.

New Mexico is home to 19 pueblos, many situated along the Rio Grande where their ancestors settled after migrating from Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico and Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. Pueblo people maintained their homelands throughout the Spanish conquest centuries ago and later as the United States made its westward expansion.

Unlike other pueblos, Santa Ana — known as Tamaya in the Keresan language spoken there — did not sell its pottery to people outside the community. Because of its rarity, Santa Ana pottery sold for comparatively high values during the 1980s, according to the tribal historic preservation office.

No place in the commercial market

Investigators say many of the stolen items are directly related to traditional activities, meaning they qualify as sacred objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Those more than a century old qualify as antiquities protected under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

NAGPRA has opened up more opportunities for tribes to reclaim culturally significant items from museums, universities and other institutions over the last year, and Congress passed legislation in 2022 to prohibit the export of sacred Native American items.

But the export law has yet to be implemented, and tracking items through auction houses and private collections can be difficult because descriptions are often incorrect or intentionally misleading, according to Shannon O’Loughlin, CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs.

“These are items that were part of another culture’s religion, life ways, ways of being, things that hold close to our identity and that are part of our story and our relationships with one another,” said O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

The association, which monitors auction houses around the world, has this year identified more than 200 auctions selling 13,900 potentially sensitive items tied to Indigenous nations in North America.

Not giving up

At Santa Ana, the mission is simple — to bring home as many of the stolen items as possible.

“We know they’re out there,” said Armijo, the pueblo governor. “We’re not giving up.”

Atop the list is a buffalo hide war shield decorated with a pair of horns and rays of alternating colors — symbolism still revered by the pueblo.

After reviewing ledgers kept by Larry Frank, an author and Native American art expert in northern New Mexico, the team discovered the shield had been listed for sale at a gallery in New York City. The gallery posted a picture of the shield online in 2021, saying it was from Jemez Pueblo, not Santa Ana, and noting the shield had been acquired by a Canadian collector.

Donald Ellis, the gallery’s owner, told The Associated Press via email that Frank had the shield for more than two decades and that there were no claims or concerns regarding its provenance when the gallery acquired it in 2005.

“The shield was acquired in good faith, from a credible and reputable source,” Ellis said.

He said his gallery reviews all available documentation for the work it acquires and consults with experts to identify gaps in ownership history, but that it can be difficult to establish the provenance of Native American pieces from the 19th century and earlier.

Ellis said he didn’t fact-check the Instagram post about the shield being sold to a Canadian collector and that he has no information on its current whereabouts.

Jarrett Lujan, a cultural resources coordinator with the pueblo, said his grandfathers taught him about passing along traditions to the coming generations. That means he must bring back the stolen pieces of Tamaya culture for his daughter and others.

“That’s all we’re looking for,” he said, “to empower them and encourage them to keep the culture alive.”