The Return of the Ahayu:da: Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution

The Return of the Ahayu:da, Lessons for Repatriation from Zuni Pueblo and the Smithsonian Institution, by William L. Merrill, Edmund J. Ladd and T. J. Ferguson, published in Current Anthropology in 1993, is a peer reviewed case study, co-authored with a Zuni cultural specialist, of the Smithsonian's 1978 return of sacred war god effigies to Zuni Pueblo, among the earliest and most influential repatriation cases predating the federal NAGPRA law. Its strength is exactly that co-authorship, combining the Smithsonian's own institutional account of the negotiation with Ladd's standing as a Zuni cultural expert, giving the case study a perspective from both sides of the repatriation rather than only the museum's. Its limit is that it examines one specific, relatively cooperative case from the 1970s, so a claim about repatriation disputes generally, including the more contested cases NAGPRA later had to adjudicate, needs sources engaging that wider and often less cooperative pattern directly.