New York's Natural History Museum repatriates illegal remains
One of New York's most iconic museums is relinquishing its collection of about 12,000 human remains. Administrators say the facility has been collecting bones since the 1940s using methods now considered «offensive» and «racist.»
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) will remove a dozen human bones for examination to determine their origin, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. Anthropologists will also be spending more time studying the collection as the museum faces questions about the legality and ethics of its acquisitions.
“Finding answers to what exactly we have here and how to actually describe it as fully as possible is what's important moving forward. Collections of human remains are made possible by extreme power imbalances. Moreover, many researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries then used such collections to promote an anti-scientific, white supremacist agenda, namely the identification of physical differences,” said museum President Sean M. Decatur.
< p>According to the New York Post, the New York museum has the remains of 2,200 Native Americans in its collection, which must be repatriated to descendants under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed more than 30 years ago. However, only 1,000 skeletons were returned.
The human remains currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History occupy 12 display cases and range from skeletons to tools and beads made from or including human bones, officials said. them in itself, there is also a fully reconstructed skeleton of a Mongol warrior from 1000 AD and a 19th-century Tibetan apron made from human bones.
But it is not these artifacts that are causing controversy — there are collections consisting of skeletons dug up or stolen from graves throughout the city and state at the beginning of the last century.
One such collection is the bones of five black adults who were stolen from Manhattan Cemetery in 1903, The New York Times reports. The remains were donated after workers came across the colonial-era bodies during construction of the Inwood area, piled the skulls into a pyramid and photographed them.
“Of course, for an African American, the issue of race is of particular interest. The legacy of the dehumanization of black bodies through enslavement continues beyond death in the way these bodies were treated as part of the scientific project,” Decatur commented to the newspaper.
There are no legal rules for returning the remains of African Americans, although Congress passed a law in 2022 protecting their burial sites. And already in 2023, the Penn Museum in Philadelphia received court permission to bury the skulls of 20 people, many of whom were formerly enslaved African Americans.
The Natural History Museum also houses a “medical collection”: about 400 sick, mostly poor New Yorkers who died in the 1940s and were transferred to medical schools and then AMNH, which some legal scholars say was an illegal move.
Some experts said New York law prevents schools from donating corpses to museums because “there is no clearly legal way for human remains to end up in a museum,” according to Wake Forest University School of Law professor Tanya, who specializes in human remains law. Marsh.
The museum's attorneys said it had reviewed the legal issue and «does not believe that any remains from this collection came into the museum's possession other than through legal channels.»
According to the museum, the anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro, who sought to create the reference collection, was a celebrated expert on evolution, although today his emphasis on racial differences is subject to criticism.
AMNH President Decatur stated that he considers Shapiro's work on eugenics to be «bad science»: «Do I consider him a quality scientist? I would say no. His science is not something that could be considered respectable and worthy.”
Professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina Carlina Maria de la Cova commented on the situation: “Today we would consider such approaches to be scientific racism. But at that time, scientists exchanged people the same way children exchange Pokemon cards now.”
In recent months, New York College professor Erin Thompson learned about the New York museum's «medical collection» while conducting research into the ethical and legal issues surrounding its holdings of remains. She said that when she tried to more fully examine these and other remains, the museum blocked her path and denied her access to its catalog.
Museum spokeswoman Ann Canty said the catalog of human remains is not publicly available.
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Why did they decide to return the bones now? Unlike bodies acquired more than a century ago, people whose bones are in the “medical collection” may well have living relatives. Most of the people's names are listed in the museum's records, but it is considered inappropriate to disclose them.
“We would like to be truly in contact with the descendants of the families,” officials said. We are limited by the scope of our archival records. I don't think this is a reflection on our librarians or archivists. This is a historical inadequacy of documentation,” anthropology department chair Ashley Hammond said she hopes the collaboration will continue.
Hammond said she believes there is still value in preserving the remains as a “medical collection.” Some researchers disagree: “These remains have served their time. Often remains are brought to museums with grandiose ideas of what they will achieve, and scientific research very rarely achieves these goals,” said Samuel Redman, an anthropological historian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.