A wampum belt comes home after ninety years in storage

The belt left in 1934 in circumstances the museum's own file describes as unclear. It came back on a Saturday in a wooden case built for it by two men from the community who had never seen it.

The agreement runs four pages. Three of them are insurance and transport. The fourth is the condition — and the condition came from this side of the table.

It is not an artifact. It is a record. Records get read, and you cannot read a thing through two centimetres of glass in a room that closes at five.

A member of the repatriation committee

It will be kept in the community, brought out when it is needed, and handled by people who know what it says.

The museum has been careful in public and, by its own account, slow in private. The file that came with the belt runs to sixty pages and contains three different accounts of how it was acquired, none of them written by anyone who was there.

The committee has asked for the file to be copied and kept alongside the belt. That request was granted without discussion, which several people noted was the easiest thing anyone agreed to in four years.

Repatriation files usually turn on ownership, and this one deliberately did not. The committee's position from the first meeting was that ownership was not in dispute and never had been; what was in dispute was custody, and custody is a practical question with a practical answer.

That reframing shortened the negotiation by years, according to people on both sides of it. It also produced the fourth page: if the argument is about custody rather than title, then how the thing is kept becomes the substance of the agreement rather than a footnote to it.

The case was built in three weeks by two men who measured the belt from photographs, because they were not permitted to measure it directly until it arrived.