Nearly a half-century ago, a patch of skin, stretched and tanned like an animal hide, was hand-carried Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation and quietly buried. No one knows where it is, because the Arapaho Sun-dancers who performed the ceremony never told and they've since died Three-hundred and thir- ty miles to the southeast of that sacred burial ground is a book without a cover locked in a safe in the basement of the University of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology.

The skin that was buried once protected the old book. Published in Latin in 1700s Europe, “The History of Christianity” with its ghastly cover was given to Iliff as a celebrated gift in 1893 by a traveling Methodist minister. He got it from the family of white-squatter farmer named David Morgan. who murdered a Lenape man for daring to walk on what he considered to

be his property. Morgan, who is still lauded in West Virginia as “The Great Indian Fighter,” then skinned the man’s body and created a leather hide that he used for knickknacks, including the book cover.

The book was then displayed for 30 years under glass like a crown jewel in several areas at Iliff, including the heralded Ira J. Taylor Library. In 1974, a group of Iliff students and Indigenous leaders had had enough, contacted the Sundancers, and made things right — sort of.

But in a second act of indecency, instead of owning up to the ugly episode, Iliff opted to erase it, by requiring everyone who was involved in the skin’s relocation to sign a confidentiality agreement.

That confidence was broken when Tink Tinker, an Osage scholar hired by Iliff in 1985, was told about the hidden book by a fellow professor.

For a while, Tinker was so hurt he couldn’t even speak about the book and considered quitting. “I’m not Lenape, but this is an Indian person,” said Tinker, who compared the display of the “trophy” to a Confederate monument.

“It justifies the whole Christian conquest, and here it was on display in a Christian school of theology,” he said.

While Tinker’s statement indicts the whole of Christianity, it is a view not shared by all scholars. Not all characterize the Western expansion as primarily a Christian expansion.

Instead of leaving Iliff, he decided to rip off a cover of his own with a bleeding 2014 essay to expose his employer. It was titled “Redskin,tanned Hide: A Book of Christian History Bound in the Flayed Skin of an American Indian.”

Enter newly appointed Iliff President Tom Wolfe, who supported Tinker, nullified his nondisclosure obligations and vowed to take the issue head-on, because “secrets kill people,” he said.

The two are now intent on atoning for Iliff’s dark past by leaving the decision of what to do with the coverless artifact in the hands of the Lenape people. The Lenape, formerly known as the Delaware, originally lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, but are now scattered throughout the U.S. There are about 14,000 Lenape today.

Last April, Wolfe and Tinker brought five tribal representatives to Denver for a conference with school leaders to discuss the book in the basement.

But when Curtis Zunigha surveyed the room, he was immediately disenchanted. The former chief and cultural director of the Oklahoma Delaware delegation saw a gathering of people but no book.

“I asked Tom Wolfe specifically, ‘I want to see this. It’s in a basement or a closet. Show it to me!’ He brought it out. It’s a small book no bigger than the size of an ipad.”

Even without its cover, the pages were spooky for Zunigha, who described himself as “Just an old Indian” whom no one is going to listen to.

“We brought our voices to remind them to bring truth to the narrative,” he said.

Iliff ’s messy narrative is just one of many such incidents plaguing American universities despite the fact that a generation ago, Congress passed a law requiring colleges and museums to return Native remains and artifacts in their possession.

Harvard, the University of California Berkeley and Brown are among the schools that have faced criticism for how they have handled returning property to Native Americans.

The University of North Dakota is the latest to come under fire for a grisly discovery of 250 boxes of sacred Indigenous bones and artifacts on campus. University President Andrew Armocoste admits that in those boxes are the remains of dozens of Native American people.

Remains from more than 108,000 Indigenous people and more than 765,000 artifacts are known to be held by museums, universities and federal agencies, according to the National Park Service.

Wolfe’s message to the

Lenape is that Iliff is listening. And the Lenape are talking.

At the end of the April conference, they gave the Iliff School of Theology a list of demands, including creating an endowed professorship to be filled by a Native American activist scholar, a required course and interpretive center and, perhaps most surprisingly, a memorial or traveling display featuring passages of the book complete with audio recordings read by Iliff students. Once these demands are filled, then the Lenape will decide what to do with the book.

Wolfe said that the board is committed, but that the requests “will not be accomplished in one year.”

Still, Tinker is retired, Wolfe will follow him soon, and Iliff only has one Native American student and one visiting scholar, a woman from the Chickasaw Nation who is paid by an endowment created by Tinker.

Zunigha, 69, is frustrated with what he sees is a slow-motion academic process. “It’s not just Iliff. I see it all the time with universities and museums. It’s always like ‘My dog ate the homework’ and ‘My back hurts’ and you never get around to getting it done.”

Said Zunigha, “We need the help of the non-indian community to make changes and make things right. We can work together. The issues have not gone away just because we buried the Indian skin in 1974.”