An elaborate piece of Native history that sat in a La Center family’s closet for years is now on display in a South Dakota museum for all to see.
La Center’s James Newell was ready to pass down a family heirloom — a Native headdress and clothing — to his son, Eric, but Eric decided it was time for the clothing to return home to South Dakota.
The keepsakes — a headdress adorned with eagle feathers down to the ground, a buckskin fringed shirt with beadwork, buckskin pants and a weathered pair of moccasins and more — were kept in a battered suitcase the Newells passed down for almost six generations.
James Newell is a fifth-generation descendant of Major Cicero Newell, an agent for the federal government’s Indian Affairs Office beginning in the late 1870s in present day South Dakota. Cicero Newell documented that he had received the articles of clothing from Lakota leader Chief Spotted Tail during Newell’s stint as an agent.
“It’s now almost 150 years old, and so my son and I were sitting at dinner and I said, ‘Eric, when do you want to inherit this suit in the suitcase,’ ” James Newell said. “And he just said, ‘Dad, isn’t it time we give it back?’ ”