Indian museums may get a federal budget reprieve

By AP and Journal staff | Friday, February 10, 2006

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The federal budget proposal includes another year of funding for Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, as well as Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Mont., and Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, Okla.

The Bush administration budget increased funding for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, or ICAB, which oversees the museums, from the $1.14 million approved by Congress for the 2006 fiscal year to $1.16 million for FY2007.

The IACB had said as recently as December that it planned to eliminate funding for the museums.

The Sioux Indian Museum is in The Journey Museum in Rapid City. More than 30,000 people visited the museums last year, 19 percent more than the previous year, officials said.

Paulette Montileaux, curator of Sioux Indian Museum, learned about the reinstatement of funding Thursday morning.

"It's a great piece of news," said Montileaux, who greeted the news with the caution of anyone familiar with federal budgets. But she said she is optimistic that the funding will stay in IACB's budget.

"This gives us some breathing room," Montileaux said.

Since IACB announced that it was cutting the funding for the museums, several people have called asking what would happen with items in the Rapid City collection, Montileaux said.

"There's a lot of work in the collection that belonged to people from this area - all the reservations in South Dakota - and objects have been donated from people that were in the area 100 years ago," Montileaux said. "It would have been pretty sad."

Sioux Indian Museum has an annual budget of about $140,000 to $150,000, and The Journey receives $1,000 per month to house the collection, Montileaux said when museum officials were fearing the loss of federal funding.

The turnaround in funding was also good news to Blackfeet Tribal Councilwoman Betty Cooper in Montana.

"I have people - elders and family members - coming into the office all the time and asking 'What is going to happen to the museum?'" she said. "Within the museum, we have all our artifacts, ceremonial bundles, our shields and everything else that belonged to our families here."

Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., said he and a coalition of lawmakers from South Dakota and Oklahoma pressed hard for the Bush administration to include funding for the IACB museums. The IACB is a branch of the Interior Department.

The Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning attracts more than 15,000 tourists annually and houses a collection of more than 1,500 Blackfeet artifacts.

Last year, the IACB told staff at the three American Indian museums that there was a plan to shift museum funding to fighting fraud in the Indian art and artifacts business.

Unless another group or funding organization would step up and assume responsibility for the museums, the Interior Department planned to close them in October 2007, with their collections to be sent to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Rehberg, along with Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Rep. Stephanie Herseth, D-S.D., lobbied against the planned closures.

Cooper, who is also co-chairwoman for the Cultural Committee for the Blackfeet Tribal Council, said funding the museum will continue to be a challenge.

"We need to pull everybody into this," she said. "We will continue with that more so than ever. I know how fast a year can go by."