Earlier this month, members of the Navajo Nation went to a Paris auction house, outbid a French art collector and bought seven masks for about $9,000.

Objects of cultural significance to the Hopi Tribe were also available at that same auction, but representatives declined to travel, or bid.

For more on the issue of cultural repatriation, we turn to James Riding In, an associate professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University. I asked him how decisions are made about how to try to get items back.