Nez Perce Payback

 of the Pacific Northwest $608,100 the tribe was charged to keep control of some 20 items collected in reported that the items came to Oberlin College. In the 1970s Oberlin donated them to the Ohio Historical Society, which never displayed them. Learning of the collection’s existence in the 1970s, the tribe was granted the loan of the lot, which includes items like the Nez Perce moccasins below, for 20 years. In 1996, the society said the tribe could keep the collection—for a price. The tribe paid. In November 2021 the Ohio society reimbursed the Nez Perce in full, noting that if the society possessed the collection today, it would freely return it to the Nez Perce. The Spalding-Allen Collection is now known as the Wetxuuwíitin Collection. In Nez Perce, that word means “returned home after a period of captivity.”