Glasgow may give up the shirt, which will reunite the Lakota with an object sacred to them, but that will put the fear of God into museums all over Britain.Why? Just imagine what would happen if every group that lost an object of spiritual or cultural significance during the days of Empire demanded it back. His battle will be fought with courteous and elegant words at a public hearing on Friday, and the outcome decided at a meeting of the city council a week later. This is a Ghost Dance shirt, stripped from a dead warrior on the battlefield. It has been behind glass at the museum for more than a century.This week Mr Gonzalez will fly to Scotland to win it back. The remarkable thing is that the battle is continuing at the Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.

Tucked away in an upstairs room, at the far end of this echoing building full of stuffed animals and other Victoriana, is an audiovisual display on Wounded Knee. Its centrepiece is a creased and tattered calico garment, decorated with tassels and feathers, punctured by bullet holes and stained with blood. We are fighting the same battles that have been fought for 300 years.” Those words come from Mario Gonzalez, an attorney who is part Lakota and part Mexican. With their bare hands, despite the volleys, Lakota men managed to kill 25 soldiers.A blizzard swallowed the field, and the wounded were left to freeze.

Whatever triggered the massacre, by the time the soldiers stopped firing there were 150 men, women and children dead, and many more wounded. Wear the shirt that invokes the spirits of your ancestors, and no bullet will enter your body. Dance, and the plains will fill with buffalo again, dead warriors will rise alive, and the white man will sink into the earth

They were wrong. Wrapped in blankets against the snow, and travelling under a white flag, the refugees were on their way to surrender when the Seventh Cavalry arrived. The soldiers searched the camp and confiscated guns, knives and axes from the exhausted braves, who could hardly resist.
Then a shot rang out Nobody quite knows what happened.

Some say a deaf Indian did not understand the order to give up his gun, others that a medicine man threw dust in the air – a prayer for protection interpreted by the cavalry as a signal to attack. Four days after Christmas, in 1890, hundreds of men, women and children belonging to the Lakota nation of Sioux Indians camped at a creek called Wounded Knee in South Dakota. The Lakota were starving – their crops had failed, their cattle were sick, the buffalo had gone – and they were ready to end the long war against the settlers who had stolen their land The holy men gave them hope Dance, and you will become invincible, they said. The trustees were not about to dismember collections that were best seen as a whole.In any case, the British Museum Act of 1963 made it illegal for them to dispose of any object at all, from any collection in the museum. “It would take another act of parliament before we could do that,” said Hamilton So that’s that, then CM.

Applications have been received from Maori and Aboriginal Australian representatives, he says, but they were not made by governments so they were “treated differently”. Although the case of the Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt had made those in charge of all museums “sit up and think”, Mr Hamilton said the outcome would not affect his own institution. That seems remarkable until he reveals that as an international museum it is only obliged to recognise requests that come directly from governments.
Pressure groups and campaigners need not waste their ink. The museum is crowded with objects of special cultural or spiritual significance to people groups all over the world, but Mr Hamilton claims there are no outstanding requests. They were the first authentic classical Greek sculpture to be displayed in London, where they caused a sensation. Unfortunately the Greek government does not accept that the original sale was legal, and has asked for them back So far the answer has been a polite but firm refusal.