Auburn Logan wearing some of the traditional regalia pieces she says were stolen and later returned. (Courtesy/Auburn Logan)
Just over a week after Auburn Logan reported her traditional regalia pieces stolen, she got a message request on Facebook that she couldn’t ignore.
The message, delivered Nov. 28 at 9 a.m., read, “Can I please help you get your belongings back? Are you in Salem today?”
The messenger’s Facebook said he was from Salem and attended Silverton High School, but Logan wasn’t buying it. “Anybody can just be a catfish or anybody can just make a profile,” she said.
But the messenger, whose real identity remains a mystery to Logan, ended up returning the items without a scratch.
Logan, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, recently got her car back after it was stolen from her new Salem apartment. But missing from the trunk was a box of traditional regalia pieces, including earrings, moccasins, necklaces, otter furs and scarves.
She turned to Facebook and Twitter, where her post asking the public to help find them got over 7,000 retweets and was seen by almost half a million people. Some of the missing pieces she made herself, while others were handed down from the Yurok, Tolowa and Karuk Tribes – of which her grandfather was a member – when she was as young as 5 years old.
Logan said she told the messenger she was at work and not in Salem. He wrote back saying that he didn’t steal her belongings or car, that had seen someone “opening your medicine pouches,” and he was relieved to see her Facebook post asking the public to help find her regalia.
“I don’t know if I located all of it. But there was quite a bit that I saw,” she recalled him saying.
Logan said she told him to meet her at Physiq Fitness in downtown Salem. “You’d better be there,” she recalled saying.
Two days later, Logan arrived at the gym, told staff what she had planned and asked them to keep an eye on her during the meeting. She said she was warming up at the gym when the man messaged her saying he was outside, so she went out to meet him. “I’m not even standing there for a minute, and then I turn around and he’s walking down, and he has my box,” Logan said.
After realizing not a single piece was missing, and each was left intact, Logan broke down outside the gym. “I was totally making a scene,” she said, to the point where a staff member went outside thinking she was in trouble.
As Logan was overwhelmed with relief, the man repeatedly asked if she was okay or if she needed anything. “I couldn’t even get words out. I was just bawling and bawling and bawling,” she said.
“But I’m still trying to figure out who this guy is,” she said of the messenger, who was wearing a mask, bike helmet and hood when he returned her items.
What really happened to her regalia and how the man got them is still unclear. “I feel like I’m not being told the whole story,” she said.
Sgt. Jeremy Landers, spokesperson for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, said the investigation remains open and he is not aware of any arrests.
Logan said she held her own ceremony with the regalia pieces, which are now in a safer place. “I prayed on them, I sang with them, and they are in the middle of just healing right now,” she said.
On Nov. 29 when they were still missing, Logan told Salem Reporter she felt like a part of her identity was stolen with the regalia pieces. Now, she feels she got a “huge” part of herself back.
“There’s a lot of love in these pieces and there’s just so much passion, and it’s history,” she said. “It just holds so much power, and the power for it to come back home means so much to me, all in one piece. That just shows me that, I don’t know what kind of medicine and I don’t know what kind of prayers were sent out to me in my direction, but they worked.”
Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.
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