This is despicable and hits home with me. My ancestors arrived in Iowa in the 1870’s. They took up residence (in a sod home...and later built a wood home) on a nice farm on the banks of a large pond/small lake. That farm is still in my family.
It was wild and unbroken prairie at the time..with Native Americans being the only previous inhabitants. They lived on the other side of the small lake...about 100 yards away. Everyone existed peacefully together for years and traded back and forth...I know this because my Great-Grandmother told me that personally; they were “neighbors” and got along great.
They traded for things from the town store, because the Natives would not go into town (but they really wanted the items sold there...LOL!). She had an incredible collection of stone bowls, arrowheads, ax heads, stone pestles, etc....hundreds of them passed down to her from her parents. Her “door stop” when I was a child was a gigantic stone bowl.
To THINK that some stupid bureaucrat could have come in to her home to remove those items (of course she had no purchase receipts) is horrible. Most of the items that have been acquired by this collector probably came from similar collections...the families just chose to sell them. They were not originally “stolen”...they were likely given or traded.
For the record, another family member absconded with that entire collection...but they don’t live in Indiana.
I can only imagine what my Grandmother (or their own ancestors who were friends of my kin) would think of these pieces of garbage claiming “oppression.”
That is true a lot of stuff was traded around both among Indians with settlers and Indians with Indians. Flint arrowheads was an example. Flint itself was a highly traded and valued commodity as it did not exist in many regions especially southern ones.