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MA Student Grace Helmick and MA/PhD Student Patrick Hussey Present at Â鶹Æƽâ°æ Graduate Research Symposium

On February 26th, MA student Grace Helmick and MA/PhD student Patrick Hussey presented their work at the 2026 Â鶹Æƽâ°æ Graduate Research Symposium. Helmick and Hussey participated in a panel titled “Indigeneity, Past and Present”, highlighting their research on Indigenous visual sovereignty and institutional repatriation practices.

Grace Helmick—whose research interests include visual anthropology and Native sovereignty—gave a presentation titled “Negotiating Sovereignty: C.M. Bell’s 1880 Portrait of Red Cloud as Diplomatic Performance.” Based on her MA research, the presentation centered on a portrait of Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud that was taken in 1880 by photographer Charles Milton Bell and is now located in Â鶹Æƽâ°æ’s Special Collections, alongside an additional eight portraits of Indigenous tribal leaders from this period. Helmick’s presentation reframed Red Cloud’s portrait, arguing that it was not a capitulation to the colonial gaze, but rather a site of strategic political visibility in which he encoded Lakota visual meaning, values, and relationships through a new technological medium. In Helmick’s words, her research “reinterprets Bell’s studio as a frontier of diplomacy—where sovereignty was negotiated—and the portraits as political performances through which subjects brokered both visual simulations and real power.” Helmick’s presentation powerfully demonstrated how photographs like that of Red Cloud can thus be resituated, in her words, as “staged encounters in which Native leaders entered—and in subtle ways, refigured—the camera’s gaze, making visible their authority, endurance, and sovereign presence” amidst a changing sociopolitical and technological landscape.

Patrick Hussey—whose research centers on policies of repatriation of Indigenous ancestral remains and their effects on community building—gave a presentation titled “The Politics of Repatriation: A Tale of Two Approaches to Repatriation.” In his presentation, Hussey introduced himself, his background and positionality as a scholar with Indigenous heritage, and his research. His MA project examines the implementation of repatriation after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the acceptance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). To this end, Hussey collected and compared specific repatriation policies and procedural guidelines of different museums, universities, and professional organizations across the US and Canada, using case studies to understand how repatriation practices work to facilitate or impede reconciliation between these organizations and the Indigenous communities whose ancestral remains and cultural patrimony they hold. In his words, “there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution” in the conversation around repatriation and, as he highlighted in his presentation, "this research may provide more comprehensive and culturally competent directions for entities housing Indigenous human remains and cultural objects."