New York‘s American Museum of Natural History is to remove all human remains from display, the institution’s president Sean Decatur has confirmed.
Via a report in the New York Times, Decatur told staff in a letter this week: “Human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power.
“Many researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries then used such collections to advance deeply flawed scientific agendas rooted in white supremacy – namely the identification of physical differences that could reinforce models of racial hierarchy.”
“Deeply flawed scientific agendas”
The museum’s collection of around 12,000 human remains includes the skeletons of Indigenous and enslaved people that were stolen from graves, as well as the bodies of New York residents.
Under the Native-American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, museums are obliged to return Indigenous remains. The American Museum of Natural History has already returned around 1,000 Native Americans remains, but has 2,200 more to repatriate.
In the letter to staff, Decatur wrote that “identifying a restorative, respectful action in consultation with local communities must be part of our commitment”.
“The legacy of dehumanizing Black bodies through enslavement continues after death in how those bodies were treated and dehumanized in service of a scientific project,” Decatur told the New York Times.
Earlier this year, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch responded to a report on the institution’s collection of human remains, which found that the majority had been gathered using unethical practices and without consent.
In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, Bunch addressed how the Smithsonian accumulated its vast collection of brains and other body parts during the early 1900s. His apology on behalf of the institution came after a Washington Post investigation.
The investigation found that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History currently holds at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts, including 255 brains.
