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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Navajo Nation Gov. Russell Begaye said he still doesn’t know who owned five ceremonial masks he was forced to purchase through a Paris auction house earlier this year.

Begaye hired a Paris law firm to help negotiate the purchase after the EVE auction house refused to halt the planned sale and return the masks to the Navajo Nation.

“We were basically up against the wall,” he said Tuesday before a hearing in Albuquerque to discuss proposed federal legislation that would strengthen penalties for the theft and sale of objects considered sacred to Native Americans.

Begaye declined to say how much the tribe paid for the masks, which are used in the Navajo Yebichai ceremony, but managed to bargain the owner down from the original $130,000 asking price.

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“To me, it was more of a bribe than anything else,” he said. “The French government wouldn’t cooperate. There was nothing we could do except try and buy them back.”

Begaye and other New Mexico tribal leaders testified Tuesday at a field hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for a proposed federal law that would ban exports and increase penalties for the theft, illegal possession and sale of tribal cultural objects.

Tribal leaders said that a lucrative market in Native American sacred objects has grown in recent years, often requiring tribes and pueblos to buy back the items from collectors.

“People are exploiting loopholes in the current law to sell these objects as art,” Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said before the hearing at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. “They are not objects of art. They are spiritual objects, deeply important for tribal identity.”

The issue gained heightened attention in May when a Paris auction house rejected calls from U.S. government officials to halt the sale of an Acoma shield and other objects the pueblo said were stolen decades ago.

As in the case with the Navajo masks, the Paris auction house refused to halt the auction, and French officials said they could do little to intercede in a private sale. The owner since has agreed to postpone the sale, but the shield remains in Paris, officials said Tuesday.

Udall and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., are co-sponsoring the measure, which would double prison time to 10 years for violating a federal law that criminalizes stealing or removing tribal objects from reservations.

The measure, called Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act, or STOP, also would ban the export of sacred objects. French officials have suggested the export ban would give them a legal tool to intercede in auction sales, Heinrich said.

“The same story is told far too many times, where items are stolen, they are exported, and they are sold on public auction around the world,” Heinrich said.