The Return of the Ahayu:da

The Ahayu:da are a pair of carved wooden effigies of the twin war gods, made new each year by Zuni Bow Priests and placed in shrines in the hills around the pueblo, where Zuni religious practice holds they are meant to weather and return to the earth rather than be preserved. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, collectors, ethnographers and museums nonetheless removed dozens of Ahayu:da from their shrines, and by the 1970s pieces sat in museum collections across the United States, valued by outside collectors precisely for the qualities, age and undisturbed exposure, that Zuni practice treats as the objects fulfilling their purpose rather than being damaged.

Zuni Pueblo argued that the effigies had never been offered for sale or transfer under any recognized authority and that their museum display was a continuing wrong rather than a completed historical event, a position that helped shape the argument behind the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Smithsonian Institution's 1987 return of its Ahayu:da followed nine years of negotiation, documented afterward by the Smithsonian curator, a Zuni anthropologist and the pueblo's own consulting anthropologist in the definitive published account of the case; other museums followed, and Zuni Pueblo has continued to pursue Ahayu:da still held elsewhere on the same terms. The effigies returned are not displayed or published by Zuni authorities after their return, consistent with the belief that governed their making.