The Umóⁿhoⁿ do not describe their Sacred Pole as an object. They call it Umoⁿ'hoⁿ'ti, the Real Omaha, the Venerable Man, and speak of it as a living elder who stands for the whole nation together. "The way I would refer to the Sacred Pole is that it is a being," the Omaha elder Lawrence Gilpin said. For a century it sat in a Harvard museum.
The glowing tree
The story of its making, as its last keeper told it in 1888, begins with a chief's son lost on a night hunt who found a tree that glowed without burning. The chiefs cut the tree and made it the Pole, and said it belonged to all the people but would be kept by one family of the Hoⁿga clan. The Pole was renewed in a ceremony that depended on the buffalo hunt. By the 1870s the buffalo were gone, and the Omaha were confined to a small reservation in northeastern Nebraska. The renewal could no longer be held.
The keeper
The keeper was Yellow Smoke, Shudenachi. Two people came to him. Alice Fletcher, an ethnologist working with Harvard's Peabody Museum, had lived among the Omaha since 1881; in 1882 she drafted the bill that divided their reservation into individual allotments, lobbied Congress for it, and by 1884 had assigned the parcels. Francis La Flesche, an Omaha and the son of the chief Iron Eye, worked at her side. In 1888 the two persuaded Yellow Smoke to send the Pole east rather than bury it with him, arguing that otherwise the nation's full story would be lost. That September he told them its origin, and the Pole went to the Peabody in Cambridge. The account the tribal historian Dennis Hastings later wrote with Robin Ridington says it more plainly: the old keeper was pressured to give the Pole up, or it was taken while he was away.
The return
A century later the tribe asked for it back. In 1988 Tribal Chairman Doran Morris and former chairman Edward Cline stood outside the Peabody and held the Pole in prayer, and the museum's faculty voted unanimously to return it, before Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. On July 12, 1989, the Pole was escorted to the tribal arena at Macy, and Morris received it for the Omaha people. Over the next two years the White Buffalo Robe and other sacred objects came home as well, and in October 1991 the remains of ancestors taken from the old village of Ton'wontonga were reburied on reservation land near the Missouri bluffs.
With no safe place for it yet on the reservation, the Pole went into the University of Nebraska's care in Lincoln. In September 2006 the Omaha named Doran Morris Jr. its new keeper at a ceremony in the state history museum there, and said the Pole would return to the reservation once the tribe had built a cultural center to receive it. The nation it stands for gathers at Macy every August for the Hede'wachi, and the Blackbird Scenic Overlook on US-75 there looks over the valley the Pole came home to.