Tribes Battle Over 'Geronimo's Headdress'

Oct. 18 -- Two men received six months probation each this week for trying to sell a historic headdress believed to have belonged to the fabled Apache chief Geronimo, sparking a battle over what will happen to the artifact.

The well-preserved 8-foot-tall war bonnet, made of 35 1-foot-long bald and golden eagle feathers, had disappeared from the public eye until last year, when Leighton Deming and Thomas Marciano were caught trying to sell it online for $1.2 million.

An undercover FBI agent posing as a buyer seized the headdress on the grounds that it is illegal to sell feathers from endangered birds, and the owner, Deming, agreed to give it up in exchange for probation.

Deming said Geronimo gave the object to his grandparents in 1909, and all parties involved believe it is authentic.

Marciano, who tried to broker the deal in exchange for $500,000 from the sale, was also given probation.

What Happens Next?But now the federal government must decide where the headdress belongs, and two tribes are staking a claim to it.

The Mescalero Apaches, one of several branches of the tribe, claim they have the only direct descendants of Geronimo, and therefore, as the chief’s rightful heirs, the headdress belongs with them.

“This is a cultural symbol very significant to the Apaches,” said the tribe’s attorney, James Burson.

The Comanche Tribe has filed its own claim, however, saying their craftsmen had made the headdress, and that Apaches didn’t wear the long-feather war bonnets. At most, it would only have been loaned to Geronimo, they say.

In their claim, the tribe said its chiefs would never have give an object of “tremendous religious and cultural significance,” to an outsider.

Burson admits the headdress was not made by Apaches. But, he says, “It would not be out of the ordinary for the chief of one tribe or band to give another” a war bonnet like the one in question.

‘Cadillac of Headdresses’The striking design of the eagle-feathered war bonnet became popular with many tribes around the turn of the last century, Burson said.