The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xiv

 

Marcella LeBeau and the Ghost Shirt she made for the Kelvingrove Museum

Richard and I went to Scotland together in 1998, a new experience for us. When we arrived, we went to a hotel, where the next morning a couple showed up—a man and his wife—and offered us a ride. We were scheduled to meet at the Buell Building, a different place than where we had met on my first visit. That building could hold only 100 people, but so many people showed up because they wanted to attend. The officials had to draw names to see who could get inside.

Some people in Scotland and in England had presented our story in all types of media to raise awareness about the Ghost Shirt, so that when we arrived it was clear that lots of people were on our side, sympathetic for our taking the Sacred Ghost Shirt back to South Dakota.

The Director of the Kelvingrove Museum, Mark O’Neill, was there, and Liz Cameron, also from the museum. Ian Sinclair helped us. John Earl, the lawyer who first saw the Ghost Shirt at a traveling exhibit from the museum, was there also.

Director O’Neill gave the opening remarks and talked about the history of the shirt, how it came to be in the museum. And then I presented my information.

The newspapers the next day said there were people were crying, sobbing in the audience as I talked. Then I presented the replica ghost dance shirt to Liz Cameron, who was a member of the Museum Board of Directors.

Following that hearing, we waited five days because the decision to keep or to give up the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt would be determined by the city council. During that time, we were invited out with people, invited often to different events.

On the fifth day, we went to the city council chambers. There, once again, the discussion began. First, a man talked for about ten minutes. He spoke against our taking the shirt back home. Despite that speech, when the vote was taken it was twelve votes for us and just one for keeping the sacred shirt in Scotland.

We were successful. We won the right to take Sacred Ghost Shirt back to South Dakota, but museum officials had criteria to follow for handling it on its trip home—it was more than a century old. Besides, the officials at the museum wanted to return the Sacred Ghost Shirt themselves to Wounded Knee. They wanted to create a cultural exchange with the people of Cheyenne River, to bring young people to the reservation and to Wounded Knee.

For some time, we brought together some of our children. I even started to make ribbon shirts for the drummers. We wanted the drummers to visit Scotland, but then a war broke out it and affected travel.

When the members of the museum committee brought the Sacred Ghost Shirt to South Dakota, Mark O’Neill, Liz Cameron, John Lynch and his wife—four of them came. They got as far as Minneapolis, when the officials in the customs office recognized the eagle feather and wouldn’t let them take the shirt into the country—the Glasgow people were white.

We got in touch with the tribal lawyer and figured out what we could do to get that shirt here. We knew Allan Duke, an Onondaga friend of ours from Woodstock, Georgia, was coming here and traveling through the Twin Cities airport. He was able to pick up the Ghost Dance Shirt and its eagle feathers and he brought it to Eagle Butte.

We had a program here in Eagle Butte when we returned, including two bagpipe players who offered to come and play here for the occasion.

The Cheyenne River Survivors Association had no authority at Pine Ridge, so we turned the program over to the Pine Ridge Association. The ceremony there began at the foot of the hill of the Wounded Knee Massacre grounds. That’s where the Glasgow people transferred the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt to the Pine Ridge people.

The cemetery atop the hill at Wounded Knee

Then the entire group started in a processional up the hill toward the mass grave which stands above the place where the chapel used to be. A photographer from New York spotted an eagle circling overhead in some of his pictures. One of the people noticed the eagle too and remarked that it was likely one of the relatives of the man who had worn that ghost shirt more than 100 years before.

When they went up the hill, they held the ghost shirt. My son Richard put out the quilts—my granddaughter Bonnie and I had made 13 quilts to giveaway, enough for all the invited guests who’d come all that distance.

The Pine Ridge people had a podium up on the hill beside the gravesite, where John Earl spoke, the man who had spotted the shirt in the Kelvingrove Museum, as well as some visitors and others, I including members of the Pine Ridge Survivors Association. A preacher, Syd Bird, spoke too.

The next day we went to Pierre, to the Heritage Center, where we also had a program and reception for our visitors from Scotland, an event at which Kevin Locke performed his hoop dancing. In order to have the ghost shirt returned, we had a contract with the Pierre Heritage Cultural Center, where it would be kept in a safe, environmentally-controlled space.

Ten years later, in July, 2008, on the anniversary of the shirt’s return, we had a ceremony here again, in Eagle Butte. The Historical Society brought the ghost shirt up here, and in a ceremony, we read the names of the those who had been killed at the Massacre. Right then, in fact, the museum in Glasgow had their own commemoration for the transfer of the ghost shirt.

I was asked to speak that day at the ceremony at Wounded Knee. I still have that speech.