In one of the largest repatriations of Native American ceremonial artifacts in U.S. history, the Smithsonian Institution has returned 217 sacred items to California’s Yurok tribe.

The artifacts — which include necklaces, arrows, baskets, headdresses and hides believed to be hundreds, possibly thousands of years old – had been stored on museum shelves for nearly a century. The Yurock tribe, California’s largest, has lived near the Klamath River in Northern California for millennia.

The tribe held a  Kwom-Shlen-ik, or “Object Coming Back,” ceremony on Aug. 13 in the town of Klamath to celebrate the return. Yurock chairman Thomas O’Rourke said, “These are our prayer items. They are not only symbols, but their spirit stays with them. They are alive. Bringing them home is like bringing home prisoners of war.”

A collector of Indian art had sold the artifacts to the National Museum of the American Indian in the 1920s. In 1989, a federal law transferred stewardship of hundreds of thousands of artifacts to the Smithsonian, requiring it to consider repatriating the items to federally recognized tribes.

The tribe will use the items for the 10-day Jump Dance starting Sept. 24, in which dancers perform inside a traditional redwood plank house to ask the creator for balance and renewal. Speaking about returning the sacred items to to their traditional use after years on a museum shelf, O’Rourke said, “It’s been a long time since they’ve heard their native voices and native songs.”

Meanwhile, the Ohlone people are seeking to protect their sacred sites around the proposed Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Point redevelopment project in San Francisco.

About a dozen members of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe held a sunrise ceremony Aug. 11 at the project site, then appeared before the city Board of Supervisors that afternoon to plead for a greater say in how their traditional lands are developed. The tribe, which numbers 2,000, currently lives primarily around Pomona, in Los Angeles County, but can trace its genealogy back to San Francisco’s Mission Dolores.

According to tribe chairman Tony Cerda and others, San Francisco, in preparing the environmental impact statements for the 700-acre project, failed to follow state rules that require notifying “the most likely descendants” if there are suspected burial sites.

City officials disagree, saying they did notify Ohlone tribes about the project but also that San Francisco, as a charter city, is exempt from many of the state’s notification requirements.

The situation is complicated by the fact that although it’s certain that the Ohlone were the primary American Indians living in the Bay Area before the arrival of Europeans, no one knows for sure which Ohlone tribe lived where – making land claims difficult. What’s more, Ohlone tribes are not recognized by the federal government.

Nevertheless, Cerda and his tribe appear to have made an impact on the Board of Supervisors, which unanimously approved a resolution asking the Planning Department and the Redevelopment Agency to implement protocols for working with the Ohlones on the project.

The tribe wants to ensure that its ancestral burial grounds are not desecrated, and it is also advocating that the project include a cultural center with a sacred ceremonial site and a genealogical research facility.

Learn more about the Oholone at the Oholone Profiles Project.