This Native-Run Raptor Center Is Safeguarding Sacred Birds, Feathers, and Practices

On a brisk December night, three men gathered in Cyril, a speck of a town in southwest Oklahoma. They had come for a special purpose—one that connected them to their Comanche ancestors and channeled powers beyond the physical realm.

Tonight, they would be “roadmen,” the spiritual leaders of peyote meetings. This ceremonial practice involves all-night sessions of prayer and song at which attendees may consume the psychoactive cactus peyote. Many Indigenous Americans, especially those who are members of the Native American Church, consider it to be integral to their culture. “It’s who we are,” says Charles Tahah, one of the Comanche roadmen present at the demonstration that evening.

Kneeling in a small room painted a brilliant marigold yellow, Tahah and his spiritual brothers, Travis Codynah and Randall Foye, lowered their heads, closed their eyes, and began to sing. They were sharing just a few of the countless “journey songs” that would be sung at an actual peyote meeting. Chanting in Comanche, their voices rose and fell to a rapid beat they kept with a gourd rattle and water drum. Even nonspeakers could pick out one distinctive word in several songs: Kweeni, or Golden Eagle. That species’ special energy was also present in fans the men held, each made from a full set of tail feathers. The fans are crucial for peyote meetings: Ceremonial prayers cannot reach the heavens without them. “To anyone else, they’re just feathers, but to us, they’re something special and powerful,” Tahah says. “They’re wind made flesh.”

Virtually all Native American tribes assign special importance to feathers and other parts from a wide array of birds. Feathers are believed to encapsulate the animal’s energy, and they serve different ceremonial purposes, depending on the culture. For Comanches, Golden Eagles are the most cherished. “Historically, the belief of our people is that only the Golden Eagle can fly high enough and far enough to see the face of God,” says Waha Thuweeka, co-director of Sia: The Comanche Nation Ethno-Ornithological Initiative.

Sia, which means “feather,” has captive-bred and released hundreds of Golden and Bald Eagles, helping to rebuild wild populations. The organization is also one of the few places Native Americans can legally obtain feathers for cultural and spiritual purposes, and it runs the only repository of feathers from both eagle and non-eagle species. The feathers in the fans Tahah, Foye, and Codynah used that December evening were molted by Golden Eagles that live at Sia, and the group supplies members of about 150 tribes per year with feathers from a wide range of revered birds.

Sia makes a unique contribution to the ornithological world, says Patrick Redig, cofounder and director emeritus of The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota. “It’s fundamentally blending the cultural history and importance of the eagle to the Comanche and other Native American tribes, but with an eye to addressing the conservation of the eagle in modern times,” he says. Such an operation “just doesn’t exist elsewhere, and it’s really important to eagles because they need it—they need advocates.”

Eagles face a multitude of threats, including collisions with wind turbines and power lines, lead poisoning, and habitat loss. Now the growing popularity of peyote meetings within and beyond Native communities, as well as an increasing demand for regalia for powwows, is feeding a black market for eagle feathers.

Waha Thuweeka and Troy, Sia’s other co-director (he doesn’t use a surname), have watched as the sale and use of illicit feathers has “exploded,” Troy says, especially in the past couple of years. Deeply concerned about the impact of this escalating illegal trade, they are fighting to save eagles while maintaining their culture. “We live in a time when an eagle can no longer forfeit her life to satisfy culture, not any culture,” Waha Thuweeka says.

Golden Eagles have always been part of Waha ­Thuweeka’s life. He can trace his family back through seven generations of Numunuh, as Comanches call themselves, on his mother’s side. His family’s historic responsibility was to maintain “the bird ways,” he says.

His German-Irish father had his own obsession with birds and could identify a feather blindfolded, just by its texture. “That’s how I first got to know the birds, through the plumage,” says Waha Thuweeka, whose Anglo name is William Voelker. His father amassed a collection of raptor feathers, including some 2,200 Golden Eagle tail sets, and numerous carcasses—many sent from ranchers when eagle persecution was commonplace, before the government strengthened protections.

Eagles were first federally protected under the 1900 Lacey Act, which bans the trade and transportation of bird parts across state lines or international borders. Then the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it illegal to harm, kill, or keep any native migratory bird or part without a permit. But by the 1930s it was clear that stricter regulations were needed to stem the decline of eagles from rampant shooting and habitat loss. In 1940 the government passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act, adding heftier penalties for harming the birds or possessing or selling their feathers and other parts. For the Golden Eagle Amendment to that act, passed in 1962, Waha Thuweeka’s father worked with federal authorities to create language and protocols that supported Native cultural interests, ensuring Native Americans and others could legally keep feathers and parts already in their possession.

In 1972 George Sutton, an acquaintance and leading ornithologist, arranged for Waha Thuweeka to take graduate-level courses at Cornell University. There he shared quarters with Pride, a beloved Golden Eagle he’d brought with him, and studied ornithology, avian physiology, and genetics. He also established connections with prominent raptor experts, including Tom Cade, who founded The Peregrine Fund, a raptor conservation nonprofit.

When he returned home, Waha Thuweeka continued working with birds, including through a captive-breeding program and avian surveys. One day, in 1979, he broke a personal rule and picked up a hitchhiker. The young white man was Troy. “There was a baby eagle sitting on the seatback,” Troy recalls. “I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’”

Waha Thuweeka explained that he was releasing the captive-bred chick into the care of wild foster parents. Troy, who had recently left the Army after being injured in a helicopter crash, was fascinated. That summer he joined Waha Thuweeka on an annual eagle banding survey on Numunuh historic lands. On their final day, tragedy nearly struck when two eaglets jumped from their nest and landed in the North Laramie River. Troy immediately leapt into the fast-flowing water and saved them.

Back at Waha Thuweeka’s parents’ house, his Grandmother Eviyah summoned Troy to a fire in the backyard and began a ceremony to take him “captive.” Only Comanches born prior to the  tribe’s final surrender to U.S. troops in the late 1800s were permitted to take these captives, a practice historically reserved for young people whose families Comanches had killed. Grandmother Eviyah was the last Comanche known to invoke this privilege, which made Troy a member of the family and tribe. Though neither man had told her about Troy’s heroism, she named him Kweeni Mahqueetsoi Okwetuni, or “he who saves the eagle from the water.”

In addition to monitoring wild eagles, the duo began working to rebuild the raptors’ populations. Employing an artificial insemination technique that Waha Thuweeka had pioneered, they produced and released more than 400 Golden and Bald Eagles into the wild from the 1970s through the early 1990s.

Waha Thuweeka and Troy formalized their efforts in 1999 with the creation of Sia. The center, funded primarily by donations, combines elements of a museum, archive, shrine, botanical garden, and raptor sanctuary. One room is a dedicated research space, packed floor to ceiling with books, historical documents, and photographs related to both eagles and Comanches. Another is a state-of-the-art archival storage facility.

Eagles are at the center of Sia’s operations. Many of the more than 100 resident raptors are captive-bred eagles, some of them descendants of several generations of Comanche birds. Sia also provides a home for some formerly wild birds that cannot be released, especially species significant to Comanches. That includes two wing-injured Harlan’s Hawks, a Crested Caracara born with a feather deformity, and a Zone-tailed Hawk that was hit by a car. Waha Thuweeka and Troy, who don’t give themselves salaries, live on the property. “This is not a job,” Waha Thuweeka says. “This is a hereditary life’s calling.”

Sia’s influence extends far beyond Oklahoma. In 2012 Sia signed an agreement with the Spanish government to establish a joint raptor conservation center in Spain, where they produced Maria, the first captive-bred Spanish Imperial Eagle. That partnership also provides symbolic restitution for the horses and metal that Comanche raiders took from Spanish settlers on the southern Plains three centuries ago, Waha Thuweeka says. In 2016, after several major zoos had failed in the attempt, Sia succeeded in hatching the first captive-bred ‘Io, or Hawaiian Hawk. The center is also the only place in the Western Hemisphere to propagate nonnative species such as Verreaux’s and Steppe Eagles, which it provides to dozens of zoological partners. Sia does “things in this world that nobody else does with raptors,” says Benjamin Tuggle, former Southwest regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Waha Thuweeka attributes their success to “listening to the birds,” looking to them for cues that identify their needs in terms of food and habitat.

Even as Sia helped bolster wild eagle populations and build expertise important to raptor conservation, Waha Thuweeka and Troy had a larger, tougher goal—one that married their devotion to eagles with their fervent support of traditional Native practices. For decades, tribes had lacked a way to legally obtain culturally impor­tant feathers. Sia wanted to provide a solution to that problem.

Under the 1962 Golden Eagle Amendment, the Department of the Interior was required to provide tribal members some means for accessing Bald and Golden Eagle feathers and carcasses. Years passed, however, and the department struggled to fulfill that obligation. So around the time Waha Thuweeka went to Cornell University, he sent a proposal to the FWS to create an Indigenous-run feather repository that would build on his father’s substantial collection and help meet the needs of tribes. “Indigenous, traditional practitioners have the experience and understand the nuance of meeting the needs of other traditional practitioners,” Waha Thuweeka says.

The feds weren’t interested, he says. “We heard things like, ‘This is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.’ ”

The government met its mandate to tribes by creating the National Eagle Repository in the early 1970s. Now located near Denver, the facility is the national collection point for all deceased Bald and Golden Eagles from local, state, and federal officials, as well as from rehab groups and zoos. Enrolled members of federally recognized tribes can apply to receive a limited number of eagle remains, parts, and feathers for religious purposes. The repository now receives thousands of carcasses a year, but from the beginning it was clear that it couldn’t keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, Waha Thuweeka hadn’t given up on his vision for a fully Native-run feather repository—a mission that Troy also took up when he became a Comanche. Their first success came in the late 1990s, when their years of lobbying the government resulted in the creation of a new federal permit that allows Indigenous entities like Sia to maintain eagle aviaries for Native religious use and distribute molted feathers to tribal members. (To Waha Thuweeka and Troy’s dismay, however, the new permit prohibited the release of any captive-produced young to the wild—something they’d been doing for decades.) The Zuni received the first permit, followed by the Comanche and five other tribes. Even so, with 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, members must often wait years to obtain the feathers they require.

What’s more, while tribal aviaries helped meet the need for eagle feathers, there was still no legal pipeline for obtaining feathers from other bird species. The Yuchi people, for example, require feathers from the Whooping Crane—a species they believe to have gifted them with ceremonial songs—for spiritual dances. The Wiyot people had likewise long sought California Condor feathers to complete a ceremony that had been abruptly ended in 1860 when a group of white settlers stormed in and killed most of the people in attendance.

As Waha Thuweeka continued to argue that Native Americans needed legal access to feathers from culturally significant birds, Sia found an ally in Tuggle at the FWS. But when Tuggle began trying to push Sia’s feather repository proposal forward in 2009, he, too, met resistance. “Our law enforcement and programmatic people claimed that Sia and the Native American community aren’t capable of doing this,” he says. So Tuggle pushed even harder. “It basically became a mission of will,” he says.

In 2010, thanks to his efforts, the FWS granted Sia a special permit to distribute non-eagle feathers under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. (Liberty Wildlife, a non-Indigenous rehab facility in Phoenix, is the only other non-eagle feather repository.) With its two separate permits, today Sia is the only repository for all types of feathers.

Sia stores hundreds of thousands of feathers from more than 200 species in a warehouse offsite. Rehab groups, zoos, and falconers help maintain the supply. Sia fulfills requests from around 150 tribes per year, mainly for raptors but also for songbirds like Blue Jays and Yellow Warblers and galliformes like the Greater Sage-Grouse and Ruffed Grouse, as well as those long-sought condor and crane feathers.

Sia provides all feathers for free, and covers shipping costs out of an abundance of caution for the law. They only supply for bona fide cultural purposes. If there’s any doubt as to how feathers will be used, they rely on a verification process using connections within the tribal world. Even so, demand outstrips supply. This is especially true for eagles: Sia can send out feathers only from the 8 Bald Eagles and 20 Golden Eagles currently in its care or from those in its collection that predate the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Sia is also working to obtain the authority to distribute eagle feathers from other sources, just as the government does through the national repository.

Waha Thuweeka estimates they have a backlog of around 80 eagle applications, which will take a few years to work through. Those outstanding requests are for especially prized juvenile Golden Eagle tail feathers, which are mostly whitish with black tips, unlike the all-dark feathers of adults. (Golden Eagles molt at most six tail feathers a year.) Sia also has 290 applications for non-eagle species that they lack the feathers or carcasses to fulfill, especially adult male Anhinga tail feathers but also some Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, warblers, magpies, ravens, roadrunners, and flickers.

If Sia can’t help, members of tribes that don’t keep eagles have to join the yearslong queue at the National Eagle Repository. According to the repository’s website, it’s only now processing applications filed more than 11 years ago for immature Golden Eagle carcasses. The avian flu outbreak has the potential to further extend wait times because of extra safety measures. For those unwilling to wait, however, there is another option: the feather black market.

Historically, Comanches obtained feathers primarily through two means. The first, pit trapping, required a man to hide in a hole covered with brush and topped with the carcass of a prey species; when an eagle landed, he grabbed it by the legs, plucked the feathers he needed, then released the bird. Juvenile feathers, meanwhile, were taken by lethal means from birds that had been rendered flightless by a crop full of food. Holy items made from Golden Eagle feathers were passed down through generations.

Lethal means for procuring feathers are still practiced today—albeit with very different methods. Illegal shooting is a leading cause of death for eagles in the western United States, a 2023 study found. It’s also grown more brazen. Last October, for instance, a U.S. district judge in Montana sentenced a man to nearly four years in prison and ordered him to pay more than $775,000 in restitution for killing more than 3,600 birds, including 118 eagles, on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Officers estimated the poacher earned up to $360,000 by selling eagle feathers and parts. “We are going to feel the impacts of the Flathead Reservation’s raptor loss for years to come,” said Mike Dolson, chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, in a statement.

The prosecution was presented as a major success. But as Waha Thuweeka points out, catching poachers doesn’t solve the problem. “Yes, stop the people that are killing the birds,” he says. “But they wouldn’t be killing the birds if there wasn’t a market.”

According to the Associated Press, the poacher and his collaborators targeted these birds because they’re in such high demand for sacred ceremonies and powwows. In the past few years, as mainstream interest in psychedelics has surged, peyote ceremonies have proliferated among Native Americans and others. Demand for feather fans has risen in turn. Even greater demand for feathers is driven by powwows. At these gatherings, dancers adorned in costumes that often include multitudes of eagle and other raptor feathers compete for cash prizes that can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars. The country’s largest powwow, held in Albuquerque, draws more than 100,000 attendees and 4 million livestream viewers. Dancers know that “if they’re dripping in feathers, they’re more likely to get the attention of the judges,” Waha Thuweeka says.

A recent browse of Facebook showed how easy it is to buy illicit feathers. In a 5,000-member Native American Church–themed group, post after post advertised feathers for sale, some loose, others made into fans. Most were from Golden or Bald Eagles, but there were also feathers from corvids and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers. “Felonious activity,” Waha Thuweeka said as he scrolled past a set of tail feathers from a first-year Golden Eagle. He could tell by the quills that they weren’t molted feathers, he said, but ones “from a bird that’s freshly killed.” Sellers usually ask interested parties to message them directly for prices, but Waha Thuweeka has been told that a set of juvenile Golden Eagle tail feathers can sell for up to $1,200 to buyers in the powwow world.

In 2022 administrators from Meta approached Waha Thuweeka after he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about peyote. They wanted his help finding and removing Facebook posts advertising peyote and other natural hallucinogens. He says he raised the issue of black market feathers on an initial phone call, and “they said they would look at it.” Although the Meta team was at first diligent about taking down peyote posts he flagged, he says, they never took down any of the illegal feather offerings he pointed them to. He emailed them again in December. “The illegal offerings have grown on Facebook, and something needs to be done,” he wrote. He never received a response.

Audubon reached out to both of the members of Meta’s policy development team Waha Thuweeka had worked with. One responded and directed Audubon to the company’s press office for interview requests. The press office never responded.

When it comes to federal law enforcement cracking down on illicit online sales, Laury Marshall, now former assistant chief of public affairs for the FWS, said in an email that the agency conducts “many investigations into the purchasers of eagle feathers and parts.” Violators usually receive verbal warnings or tickets. She added, however, that the FWS does not have the personnel to undertake time-consuming investigations of the eagle trade on social media. The FWS did not respond to follow-up questions.

Waha Thuweeka and Troy have started pursuing their own solutions. They now implant all of the feathers and feather-containing items they send out with microchips linked to a registry that confirms their legal provenance. The chips could make it easier for FWS agents to identify legally acquired feathers, if and when they begin cracking down on the illegal trade, Waha Thuweeka says. FWS law enforcement staff came to Sia for a demonstration in 2010, but the agency didn’t respond to a request for comment about the technology.

Sia also engages in outreach and educational programs with tribal, national, and international groups, and these efforts seem to be making some difference. “The Pueblos are starting to think about getting feathers and other things from places like Sia, rather than going out to poach,” says Mary Motah Weahkee, a retired archaeologist and member of the Comanche Nation and the Santa Clara Pueblo.

Another solution Sia has long advocated is creating a network of regional feather repositories for both eagle and non-eagle species. Sia would provide training and advice, if desired. Tribes would obtain feathers from the same places Sia currently does—rehabbers, falconers, zoos, and more—but would work with partners in their area. Not only would this help meet demand, it would also empower tribes to take control of the sourcing of their sacred items.  In addition, it could give value to the countless carcasses and feathers from birds other than Golden and Bald Eagles that are currently thrown out or incinerated around the country. “Imagine if every tribe did this with their own feathers,” Troy says. “It would be regenerative. No birds would have to be killed.”

Making this vision a reality would require people who are as committed as Waha Thuweeka and Troy. While Western society tends to see Native American culture as something from the past, a growing number of younger Native people like Tahah, Foye, and Codynah are devoted to revitalizing an older, more culturally authentic way of doing things. “They give us some hope of these ways continuing,” Waha Thuweeka says.

Another hopeful portent came in April. The FWS granted Sia authority to release unlimited numbers of captive-produced Bald and Golden Eagles on historic Numunuh lands in six states, from Texas to Montana, for 30 years.

The permit “signals a return to Indigenous people engaging in the truest form of conservation of species for which we depend culturally and spiritually,” Waha Thuweeka says. It is also a victory for “the sanctity of eagle life.”

As long as eagles soar and Comanches call on their energy, at Sia “the bird ways,” too, will still be fiercely alive.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2025 issue as “Safeguarding the Sacred.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.