Eight years after being stolen, three Native jingle dresses showed up in an online auction. Who rightfully owns them?

Jared Kaufman, Pioneer Press
·14 min read
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Arlene Duncan was at work when she saw the text messages.

Look at these online auction listings, her friends urged. They texted screenshots of three jingle dresses, colorful handmade garments with sacred meaning in Native culture.

Don’t these dresses look familiar?

Duncan stared at her phone in shock. Of course she recognized the dresses: She’d made them herself — and hadn’t seen them in eight years.

The garments were three of the many jingle dresses she’s handmade over the past decade for several spiritual ceremonies and appearances, including one where she and other Native women veterans met then-President Barack Obama.

When her St. Paul storage unit was broken into in 2015 and her items stolen, she said, she expected she would never see the dresses again.

But three had returned, in an online auction based in North St. Paul — an auction that was set to close that very evening.

“I was literally shaking; I was in tears the whole day,” she said. “I just was so thankful that they’d shown up and were still intact.”

Ultimately, Duncan won the bids for all three dresses. After taxes and fees, she spent almost $900 to buy back her own regalia, she said.

For Native people, Duncan’s situation feels like a double whammy: Painful not only to see Native regalia auctioned off in the first place, but also that she had to pay the auction company to recover her own stolen items.

And they’re right; legally speaking, it isn’t supposed to happen this way. On top of prohibiting the sale of any stolen item, federal legislation calls for Native “cultural patrimony” to be returned or repatriated to its creator or tribe of origin. Duncan’s trio of dresses are certainly not the first, nor will they be the last, Native regalia to be sold in online auctions; the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs maintains an entire office dedicated precisely to sorting out online repatriation claims.

So what went wrong here?

Duncan’s story is about three jingle dresses, yes, but it’s about more than fabric and metal. It’s also reflective of the same culturally rooted questions of how to establish ownership — over property, over cultural artifacts, over tradition — that have defined the past several hundred years of Indigenous life under a capitalistic American legal and economic system.

‘A moment of clarity’

Arlene Duncan wanted to live closer to her mother.

In 2012, she moved up to the White Earth Indian Reservation, in northwestern Minnesota, and took a job as a domestic and sexual assault advocate. Duncan, who had attained the rank of Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps in the late ’80s and early ’90s, joined a Native veterans’ color guard in the White Earth nation, too.

As she settled into the Native community there, she was set to be honored with a traditional naming ceremony. Together, Duncan and her mother sewed a yellow and orange jingle dress for the occasion.

Jingle dresses are medicine dresses intended to bring healing, and they are labor-intensive to make, said Ashley Fairbanks, a creative director and Anishinaabe activist. For each one of the hundreds of metal cones on a jingle dress, a prayer is offered before it’s strung directly into the fabric, she said. Completed dresses are blessed by tribal elders, and traditional protocols dictate the moves dancers can and cannot perform while wearing jingle dresses. As sacred garments, Duncan said, jingle dresses also shouldn’t be placed on the ground nor in boxes without proper care.

Another of Duncan’s jingle dresses contained military patches and insignia, which she made as she became more involved in leadership of the national veterans association Native American Women Warriors. The group’s members, including Duncan, were invited to march in President Obama’s second inaugural parade in 2013. Later on while living in the White Earth nation, she sewed a simpler maroon jingle dress, too, to dance in a powwow.

By 2015, Duncan had moved back to her hometown of St. Paul. She lived off of Burns Avenue, on the East Side. Her jingle dresses and other Native regalia and jewelry, she said, were safely packed in a storage unit near the Sun Ray Shopping Center.

Until, that is, the day her storage unit was burglarized. She filed a police report, she said, but after a year or so of no progress, she said she gave up hope of recovering her dresses and threw out the paperwork. Duncan, who now lives in Chicago, said the storage unit complex has since been demolished, and she doesn’t recall its name. Photos of the broken-in storage unit were lost on an old phone, she said.

A month ago, in late February 2023, Fairbanks’s mother was browsing the auction site K-Bid, looking for sewing equipment, when she saw listings titled “Vintage Native American Jingle Dress.” Fairbanks — who has a large Twitter following and is a member of a Facebook group called Social Distance Powwow, one of the largest virtual Native gathering spaces — posted screenshots of the dresses.

Within two hours, she said, the Native community had identified them as belonging to Duncan. The community of dancers who compete on the contemporary powwow circuit is particularly tight-knit, Duncan said, and everybody knows each other’s ceremonial regalia.

After seeing Fairbanks’s social media posts, friends and strangers alike deluged Duncan with texts and Facebook messages.

“I’m thankful I have friends that were looking out for me, and that I’d made the reputation that I have in the community, in the powwow circle,” Duncan said. “I’m very humbled by it. You never know whose life you’re touching and who remembers you, so it was a moment of clarity.”

Jingle dresses are often handmade by the wearer or their family for a specific purpose and are very infrequently, if ever, sold afterward, Duncan said. On occasions where the garments are commissioned or purchased from Native dressmakers, they run anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars, Fairbanks said. A well-crafted jingle dress listed anonymously for double- or even triple-digits in an online auction is an immediate red flag.

Seeing a meaningful item treated as a commodity is particularly painful for Native people who, after generations of what Fairbanks described as genocide and cultural suppression perpetrated by the U.S. government, continue to see their traditions and symbols exploited in pop culture, she said. The thought of a non-Native person showing up to a powwow or even a non-Native event wearing regalia taken from a Native person makes her “physically nauseous to think about.”

“It really just rips at the cultural fabric we have,” Fairbanks said. “Our ancestors literally have died to protect these traditions.”

‘Not good enough to say they’re stolen’

Arlene Duncan was running out of time.

When Duncan learned her jingle dresses were listed for sale in the online auction on Thursday, Feb. 23, bidding on the three listings was scheduled to close the same day. By then, online Native circles were abuzz. They’d found Duncan, but could she get the dresses back?

She knew that, legally, she shouldn’t have to buy her own ceremonial Native items back — especially not if they’d been stolen. Yet she was also acutely aware that if she were out-bid in the auction while trying to sort out her legal rights, the dresses would slip through her grasp once again. The website that was hosting the auction, K-Bid, does not publicly attach names to bids, so even if another bidder were a friend who would’ve sent Duncan the dresses had they won, Duncan had no way to know.

When she got home from work that day, she called K-Bid. No response. She filled out an online form. You actually need to talk to U Bid, the North St. Paul-based consignment company operating the sale, they replied via email. So she called U Bid. No response.

Duncan described hours of frenzy trying to stay on top of all three auctions as they neared closing, her eyes glued to the screen as the countdown timer ticked and other bids rolled in.

Not until 5:06 p.m., about two hours before the auction was scheduled to close, did Duncan hear back from U Bid; she received an email from co-owner Josh Gotch requesting “a copy of (the) original police report” and contact info for the storage unit company so he could verify Duncan’s claims that the dresses had been stolen.

Duncan had neither; the storage company was defunct and the St. Paul Police Department’s Records Unit had already closed for the day. All she had were photos of herself making and wearing the dresses, which she sent K-Bid president Chris Schwartz via email. Gotch saw the photos, too.

To Duncan, photos of herself with what the Native community viewed as uniquely identifiable dresses were proof enough that they belonged to her. Not so for the auction companies, Gotch said, whose standard protocol for verifying stolen items relies on legalistic documentation.

“I 100 percent believe (the dresses) are hers, but were they stolen from you? That’s what we need to know,” Gotch told the Pioneer Press in an interview a few days later. “I’ve seen her wearing the three dresses, but that’s not good enough to say they’re stolen.”

But according to a federal investigator, the photos might’ve been good enough after all — if only Duncan had found out about the auction earlier.

Duncan’s photos, agent Franklin Chavez said, would have formed the basis for a strong claim that the dresses were tribal cultural patrimony — and therefore protected by a federal law that classifies them as, in a way, immutably Native property — even before any theft had allegedly taken place. The question of whether Duncan could produce legal documentation that the dresses had once been stolen might actually have been irrelevant, Chavez said, but he did not have time to fully investigate before bidding closed.

Chavez runs the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Cultural Resources Unit and, since 2018, he’s been the entire country’s point-person on repatriating items of tribal cultural heritage that appear in online auctions. Such as, for instance, a trio of jingle dresses in Minnesota.

When Chavez is alerted to a potentially sacred or ceremonial object in an online auction, here’s what happens: He’ll first conduct background research and try to track down the individual or tribe to whom the item should be returned. Then he’ll contact the auction house and request that they halt the sale, pending a fuller investigation. But it’s just that: A request. In response, he said, the auction company could agree to pause bidding on the item — or they could refuse and “basically tell me to pound some sand,” he said.

If a company pushes back, Chavez can enlist the appropriate tribal government to write an official letter of identification outlining their cultural claim to the item and, as a sovereign nation, calling for its return. And if need be, Chavez can direct U.S. federal agents in obtaining search warrants and ultimately seizing the item in question.

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At an auction house last fall in Maine, for example, FBI investigators seized what was alleged to be a portion of the scalp of an Apache person. (Through the late 1800s, government officials offered white Americans bounty payments for Native scalps; the scalp of Mdewakanton Dakota chief Little Crow was an early acquisition of the Minnesota Historical Society, which ultimately returned his remains to his descendants in 1971.) Today, U.S. governmental bodies and public institutions like museums and universities are legally bound to repatriate sacred items and human remains by statutes such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1990. However, a large-scale ProPublica/NBC News investigation found the law has largely failed to successfully reconnect Native tribes with their cultural artifacts.

As far as protected cultural items ago, jingle dresses are tricky, Chavez said. As a category, they are not inherently classified as cultural patrimony, but a particular garment could indeed qualify for federal protection if, like Duncan’s dresses, it were to have been created for, blessed for or used for a tribal or spiritual ceremony.

“Seeing the photos of her actually in the attire, I was like, yeah, she used them for more of a sacred, ceremonial purpose, more than just making them herself and wearing them for show,” Chavez said. “That’s where the conversation really started, because it’s (separate than) if the items were just stolen like any other items would be.”

Despite this, he never made it very far in the process of establishing a case. Because Duncan herself didn’t find out about the auction until the last minute, Chavez did not have enough time to fully investigate the situation or even act as a direct intermediary between Duncan and Gotch, the co-owner of U Bid.

And now, the auction is over. Although Duncan had to pay for her dresses, she does have them back in her possession. This, Chavez said, somewhat dilutes his legal options as far as Native patrimony claims, short of launching a full-scale federal investigation into the auction business itself, which he does not intend to do in this case.

Seeking a reimbursement for the dresses on the basis of the theft claim remains a legally viable option — but remains unresolved.

A few days after the auction closed, Gotch told the Pioneer Press that he would have been willing to waive the invoice for Duncan’s winning bids and send her the dresses for free if she provided a police report at any time, even days or weeks after the auction had closed. Gotch said he communicated this to her; Duncan, however, said she was never made aware of this possibility. The offer was also not clear in emails Duncan provided to the Pioneer Press. Duncan said she did not perceive any communication from auction officials to have reflected a desire to more deeply understand, let alone to solve, her situation.

“That was not the spirit of any of their emails, nor did I ever receive one phone call from them,” Duncan said. “My goal, of course, is not to bash anyone’s company, but I just expected more out of the company.”

As of this writing, no changes have been made to the status of the payment Duncan sent after the auction closed.

‘This theft isn’t new to us’

If you come across a jingle dress or another Native item, plenty of resources exist — especially here in Minnesota — to return it to the person or nation it came from.

Many tribal governments have dedicated cultural offices; staff at just about any Native nonprofit, community center or Minnesota Historical Society site, too, would know who to call, Fairbanks said.

Or, Chavez said, reach out to him directly. You can contact him at franklin.chavez@bia.gov. His office number is 505-228-8053.

“Even if it ends up not falling within our jurisdiction, we are more than willing to help,” he said.

When it comes to Native regalia, advocates said, the bottom line is that ethical concerns should outweigh any legal questions anyway.

“It shouldn’t be alright for you to own the sacred items of another culture,” Fairbanks said. “There’s no excuse for them to be in non-Native hands.”

If anything, Fairbanks said, the case of Duncan’s dresses demonstrates how the tight-knit Native community springs into action to reconnect people with their sacred objects, whether ancient or contemporary.

“People think, ‘Oh, it’s a long time ago,’ but Native people still hold that pain,” Fairbanks said. “And I think it’s a reason we’re more sensitive about things like this, because this theft isn’t new to us. … It’s just not that hard to get things back to the right people.”

As for Arlene Duncan, she plans to bring the dresses back to the White Earth reservation, where her mother still lives, so elders can reconsecrate them.

And despite her interactions with the auction company, she said, she’s grateful for everyone in the online Native community who helped reconnect her with the dresses.

“You put out hope that there are still good people out there,” Duncan said. “We move in kind of a cynical society, and a lot of times, you see negative things go viral on Facebook and not anything positive. This was just heartwarming.”

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