Scientific collections are haunted. Storage shelves in anthropology museums groan under the weight of stolen objects and remains of stolen lives. Pottery, coins, clothing, weapons, funerary objects, sacred objects, blood, bones, hair, teeth, and skin—you can find all of this and more in the storage rooms associated with major college campuses and research libraries.
According to historian of science Samuel Redman, whose book Bone Rooms explores the history of these disturbing collections, American museums contain at least half a million sets of Native American human remains. Researchers and museum administrators have acknowledged this situation for years, but weren’t doing too much about it until 1990, when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required museums to inventory their relevant collections and return items to lineal descendants and tribes upon request.
This was a start—but the NAGPRA doesn’t apply to the untold number of remains, including so-called “teaching specimens,” that have no tribal affiliation. Nor, apparently, does it apply to human remains associated with public investigations. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the recent revelations that the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (or, more specifically, emeritus professor of anthropology Alan Mann) had been holding on to human remains thought to belong to Tree Africa, 14, and Delisha Africa, 12, both of whom were killed when the Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE house 36 years ago last week. But the city of Philadelphia, it turns out, was just getting started.
Last Thursday, the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Farley, resigned after admitting that he destroyed yet more remains associated with victims of the MOVE bombing, rather than informing the family, when he found them four years ago. Incredibly, the next day Mayor Jim Kenney announced that the additional remains hadn’t been destroyed after all and had, instead, been located in a basement. Mayor Kenney’s statement included lines that would have been charming for their understatement if they weren’t so appalling, along the lines of “There are also clearly many areas for improvement in procedures used by the Medical Examiner’s Office.” A spokesman for the mayor’s office later clarified that the Medical Examiner’s Office does not have a written policy for handling remains.
You read that right. The Medial Examiner’s Office, which routinely handles human remains, does not have a written policy governing their disposal.
This is horrifying. And, yet more horrifying, it’s routine. In my post three weeks ago, I mentioned the Penn Museum’s recent apology acknowledging that at least 50 of the approximately 1,300 skulls in the Morton Cranial Collection are known to have belonged to enslaved Africans, and that an additional 14 came from the graves of Black Philadelphians. This is where the outrage has been focused, locally—but can we sit for a moment with the idea that any museum, anywhere, maintains a teaching collection of 1,300 skulls? In January, Harvard issued a similar statement, acknowledging that its collections of 22,000 human remains include the remains of at least 15 enslaved people. According to a recent report in the New York Times, the Smithsonian, too, is grappling with the presence of African American remains in its collections of human remains, with all the violence that implies.
Various sciences of the body, from forensics and anthropology to anatomy, depend on access to human specimens. In theory, we handle this today through mechanisms of consent. Willing persons can “donate their bodies to science.” I am not a historian of anthropology, but I can say, with virtually 100 percent certainty, that the 1,300 skulls at Penn, the 22,000 human remains at Harvard, the 33,000 remains at the Smithsonian, and the hundreds of thousands of human body parts housed at medical museums, anthropology collections, teaching hospitals, and, apparently, medical examiners’ offices, did not get there by consent.
The scale of these collections, with their blatant disrespect for human dignity, is stunning. They come from graveyards, institutions for the poor, archaeological expeditions, battlefields, routine crime scenes, and as “gifts” from people who claimed ownership over others.
Based on their statements and actions so far, I don’t think the scientific community, or the experts who traffic in human remains, have begun to understand the depth of rage simmering toward the institutions that have behaved this way. Collecting the skulls of enslaved people, using those skulls to develop a “science” of racism, building racist policing practices built on said science, and not bothering to formulate a plan to care for the human remains produced by police violence against Black people are all of a piece.
For hundreds of years now, these experts on the body have based their expertise on something that was not theirs. This isn’t something that can be “fixed” through a series of apologies, or even through repatriation. It requires a wholesale rethinking of what science is, who gets to do it, and what it’s for.
I don’t have a pat ending to this newsletter, except to say that if we want science as an institution to survive, we can and must do better. Starting right now.