The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is taking action to remove
human remains from its display after reports raised legal and ethical concern The museum,
holding about twelve thousand individuals remains, will revise its policies to emphasize the importance
of returning these remains. The decision follows an investigation by the Art Crime professor
Aaron Thompson, who found a lack of publicly available information about the remain The
museum acknowledges the historical misuse of human remains in scientific research rooted in eugenics and
racism, and aims to address these concerns. A substantial number of these remains
belonged to Native America, about twenty six percent, with ongoing repatriation efforts in
accordance with the law, and Thompson has also shared a database to help people
discover if their ancestors remains are in the museum's collection. This article is from
Artnet and published October nineteenth, twenty twenty three. Phil Do you want to
give a comment on this? Oh? Yes, First of all, what
do they mean by the human remains? Right? Some people might be wondering
what they mean by human remains? Basically, human remains can mean the bodies
and parts of bodies of members of a species Homo sapiens. This includes os
theological material that is whole apart skeletons, individual bones, fragments of bones and
teeths of tissue including organs, skin, cornea, bone, marrow, embryos,
and slight preparations of human tissue, nails and ears. But the question
is, I think that is going through everyone's mind is how did the museum
acquire these human remains? Were they acquired and hell legally and with consent from
the family members or the ethnic group to which they belong. Was there vision
of illicit trade? Uh? Elizabeth Blair NPR reporter reported that they came from
doing some investigative research. She found that they come from like medical schools,
stolen from sacred burial sites, and some are donations from brokers. And sadly,
some of these remains were using eugenet research, which is kind of a
flawed science agenda bas and white supremacy. So these remains were used to to
to try to support their research on these the you the genetics type research where
they were trying to use these remains us to show that people of color are
persons, mallanated persons were less than human, or not only that, but
Native American groups, indigenous groups or less than human. They are not as
superior as themselves. That is really sad that such things were done with these
human remains, and many of these remains also belong to enslaved African American And
the thing is that this museum, this museum that we are talking about specifically,
had like twelve thousand human remains and out of that twelve only twelve ten
percent, twelve hundred was returned over the decades. This is really sad.
So this is some serious stuff going on here, Kelly, what is your
take on this? I you know, I probably have a real unpopular opinion
here because I don't really care, like what happens to my remains after I'm
gone, because I'm not going to care. There is an old down story,
It's one of my favorite ones to tell about when Lautsa died. He
was the father of Daoism and Confucius was hit one of his contemporaries, and
they had two completely different schools of thought. But Confucius recognized Lautza as a
great scholar, so he went to the funeral, and when he got there,
Laudsa's closest friends were basically having a party, playing instruments, just having
a good time, and Confucius was a ball. Then he looked at him
and he said, how can you do this? You're supposed to be obeying
the proper rituals. And one of Lautsa's friends looked at Confucius, pointed at
the body and said, what does he care about rituals? Now? So
I've always kind of had that kind of attitude about it, and I realized
that that's not a common feeling in the today's world. And I realized that
a lot of people's, the people that are left behind, probably don't want
something like that done with their loved ones, that they do care about what
happens to him. So I can see where the concern comes from. I
know, I'm not like we want to realize that. And I think that
if you are going to have human remains on display, the permissions of the
people whose remains those are should have been gotten beforehand. Now I don't know
how you're going to do that with ancient remains. We can talk about that
later. But unfortunately, in most of these cases, the museum didn't have
the permission to have these things, So John, I'm going to swing it
back to you, Okay. It is kind of non consensual body desecration in
my mind for what now amounts to a pseudoscience, though in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries it was considered legitimate science. I do feel it's disrespectful to the
families and the communities of these These remains deserve to know where they are.
One of the things is that nobody bothered to tell anybody in these collections,
anybody's family where they were. The bodies just disappeared. So now they're trying
to figure out whose body is it. That's going to be pretty difficult.
They do has some records, and they've been trying to piece together some.
But actually Thompson, who wrote the article in the other article in hyper Allergic,
has found at least the regions and the tribes of ten five hundred of
the twelve thousand remains. She has information on them. Some of these are
specific to the families. They have one example of a man in Tanzania I
believe, who was hung as part of the genocide of the Germans, did
on the German West African colony, and they shipped his corpse up to an
anthropologist in Berlin who kept it for many years, and then eventually his widow
sold it to the American Natural History Museum in New York and so his and
I think they've actually identified the bones and they have it in a box,
but they have not repatriated him to Tanzania or this man's grandson who he's in
his seventies now and he really wants to have his grandfather's remains to go in
the tribal sacred site. So again, you know, they're dragging their feet
on it, sometimes claiming poverty and other times coming up with well, if
you can't keep it in a human controlled space, which they did with the
so called Copperman which was found in a mine in Peru, I believe,
for a South American country. So it's this is something that really bothers me
because they say they're changing their stuff, and granted it is recent, because
they didn't start even thinking about this until it was exposed in the press by
the criminal investigator that they might be, you know, having broken the law
about this. And the thing is that this museum isn't the only one.
There are over one hundred thousand bodies that were illicitly gotten from various inst and
are now in various institutions. The Smithsonian alone has thirty three thousand, and
hard University has twenty two thousand. There are a lot of institutions involved in
this. However, they have actually started in earnest trying to return as many
as they can. And the law that says they have to return Native American
and foreign native remains to the concerned parties the tribes was passed in nineteen ninety,
that is thirty three years ago, and they've only sent back a thousand
and two hundred overseas. They actually funded some of the expedition to grave rob
the Inuit and Eskimo peoples and some other tribes in South America. They sent
their own people to rob graves for this. Granted at the time they didn't
think of them as human, but still they're human. And I don't buy
any excuses at this point that they can't repatriate these that's bs. I mean,
like I said, put them in a box, seal it up,
send it d hs to Tanzia, Tanzania, and he'll get them. You
know. It's like, how hard can this be? You know, so
I'm a little bit upset about that. So anyway, Helen, do you
have anything to add to this. I'm going to bring to fill first,
because he was making some good points before we moved to Kelly. So I'm
going to bring it back to fail for a second. Okay, and now
I have I have plenty of say so don't you all worry about it?
You know? I do? Okay, light silent, But Jonathan, you
missed some interesting points there, and it brings in to question better. Are
not this museum which I think they did not followed the general guidelines of dealing
with human remains? Actually, I came across some information from on museum Galleries
dot their website dot point so the main responsibilities of museums managing these human remains
things like rigor, anesty, and integrity. Realized that museum did not follow
the sensitivity. They were not sensitive really to the persons who to whom family
members, to whom the remains would belonged. Are even the groups, the
ethnic groups, indigenous groups, sensitivity, respect, openness, and transparency.
They were in that open as you said, they only decide to put on
this face in the press after or in Thompson sent to report to them supposing
the problems in legality and ethics of how Coriandor's remained right, and they and
another thing that the museum did not do is they just had the remains,
but there was no there was a lack of publicly available information about the remains,
like where they were from, how they were acquired, et cetera,
who they belonged to. Right, and now the museum is saying, Oh,
the solution is we are going to return those remains, start returning more
of the remains, and you're going to create a cast, you know it
for display rather than of the remains, rather than having the actual remains.
But there's something they could have done every since. This shouldn't have to be
for our investigators to come and tell them, expose them, you know,
this is something if they can do discast. No, they could have done
that every since. But at least that's the movement in the right direction.
Yes, Alan, your thoughts, Oh, I got that. So when
we were reviewing this article, what really struck me is that, like I'm
glad, Like, yes, it's a little bit too late, of course
it is, but at least the American Natural History museum is at least trying
to do something to release those remains to the people that should have them,
you know. And I don't have any skin in that game, but I
understand having those ancestors and familiar bonds that United culture, like the person has
said, you know whatever, but it has a symbolic meaning to these people.
So I'm all in for that, and I think that's important to recognize.
But what I'm more concerned about is the way that museums have just been
holding on to Native Americans people of color artifacts, whether they're you know,
black people or Latinas, whatever it is, that they're still holding onto these
artifacts in their own museum, and the tribes and other people have to get
special permission to go into the archives and look at the things. That this
is not only happening in the United States, it's helpening other and other like
in England and other countries that have these sort of populations, Native populations a
part of their culture, and they have to actually, you know, they're
not getting to experience their own history. They have to do it with gatekeepers,
and they have to they have to cut through red when really it's it's
theirs. I and people can quibble about that, but I'm just pointing you
out. It's not our history, it's their history. And when I first
heard about this on an episode of Last Week Tonight and it and then when
I read this article, like I that's where my mind amlily went. And
it is the holding and gatekeeping of things that do not belong to us.
And and I know and museums will cry as you mentioned me, as you
mentioned before I think it was Kelly or John. I'm blanket right now because
I'm having that brain tonight. But about how the museums are belly aching because
they're going to lose money. I am so sorry. I feel so sorry
for you. Cry cry cry. Or what you do is is that you
have conversations with people of that particular culture there you're using those artifacts to make
your displays, and you talk to them about like, hey, let's find
it, let's find a happy medium, and then the things that are just
kind of sitting in storage should be returned to those people. You know,
I think everything is negotiable and you can, we can find an even balance.
But because people are concerned about profits over people, where now we see
that pattern over and over and over again. This is just another example of
it. So that's that's where my kind of concern went, because learning for
their younger generation to learn about there are people that came before them and their
own history is way more important than the white person's view of our history.
You know. I think that's a more important, important conversation, you know,
that we need to be having. So I'm going to pass it back
to you, Kelly, because I know you have other thoughts, because you
have a big brain. I don't know if I have a big brain.
I do have a lot of thoughts, so not always good thought you know.
One of the things that this conversation sparked in me was an old memory
of when I was like in second grade and when I went on a field
trip to the Field Museum in Chicago and I was so frightened by the Egyptian
mon I couldn't even look at them. They scared the shit out of me.
So I don't even know how appropriate it is to have these things on
public display where anyone can see them in the first place. They should at
least have trigger warnings. I don't know if they do nowadays. I would
hope that they do, but I don't know. I haven't been to a
museum like that in quite some time. However, however, and I'm going
to go back again with saying something that maybe people don't like. I do
think we need these repositories to learn more about the human species, how we've
changed through the millennia, and for medical purposes, for medical research. So
as a scientist, I have no problem with keeping these ancient remains available to
study. But I do think we need, as everybody has said, we
need to be sensitive to the feelings of the ancestors of these people, even
if I personally think those feelings are a bit silly. Again, so maybe
one day, and this is what I was thinking, and it's just totally
silly. But if one day, if we can ever invent the time machine,
we can go can ask people if it's okay to have their remains and
museums in the future, explain why we want to, And I wonder,
I just wonder how many people would actually in cree to that. I don't
think. I don't think we have a whole lot of remains on display in
museums if we did that. So and then another thing like if we want
to, I know, we want to return these remains back to the to
the ancestors of the people. But what do we do, like with the
ancient remains of a Scythian or an Akkadian? Who do we return those two?
Do we just take them back to where they were found to begin with
and chunk them back into ground where some were some souvenir collectors going to go
and get them for the black market. I don't know. I honestly,
I don't know. I'm gonna send it back to John though, I think
that just keying off your last point that you know, one civilizations and peoples
that no longer exist. Of course you're not gonna be able to send them
anywhere. However, you know, it's sort of like Egypt wants all of
their They want their mummies back, and they want their relics back, and
they have a vibrant ancient history museum in Cairo and Hamas I guess is his
last name, the Ministry of Antiquities, and that they're starting to get a
little jealous of, you know, and cautious about where their artifacts are going.
And they still are open to research and things like that. Scientists work
with them all the time, but still, you know, most of the
people that they they got from this were from donations like and they were still
collecting remains up until nineteen ninety six, six years after the Repaid Patriot Repatriotization
Can't Talk Bill was passed into law. And I just I just think that,
you know, if they knew already, which they had to, that
they were you know, they have to pass these back then, why did
they not just not accept it was from a journalist who came back from with
a shrunken head named Timmy from South America. Most of those shrunken heads generally
aren't real. They're usually monkeys, not humans, but some of them are
real, and so it's a it was a booming business down there, just
from my own personal experience. But I already told you the story of Kaya,
the seventy year old who's waiting for his grandfather remains, And so that's
when if you can trace those back to an exact thing that happened during a
genocidal thing, yeah you should. If it's like, if it's like Skithion,
what are you going to do? You know, there's nothing you can
do. Those people aren't even a people anymore, so you know, there's
no place to put those so you keep them in the museum and study them.
But there's that, But the American I'm going to positive right there because
we don't have much more time in the segment, and I want to hear
Phil's final opinions, give my final world word, and we're going to close
out. Okay, Phil. The The thing is, uh that Cali made
a good point about about the remains of the those groups that doesn't exist now
in present they what are they going to do with them? And I think,
yeah, I agree with it. I will say that those remains maybe,
yes, the the museum can keep, but they need to treat it,
treat those remains with respect, get as much background information as possible,
and display the information together with the remains. They can display the all of
that information because it's about education, educating younger students, educating the masses,
educating people. And and and given if they have archaeological evidence in terms of
stories, finding stories around these groups, right, that can also be posted
along with the inf mention make it interesting, uh, and and and give
some historical background to meet people aware. Okay, this is where these people
are from, this is what they used to do, and these are some
interesting facts about them and to help persons realize there were humans just like we
are, right, and they were struggling to the same things that we are.
Similar things we struggled with, even sometimes on a bigger scale because they
didn't have medical science or certain technologies to help make life a lot easier.
Yeah. So yeah, I think that does the way to go dealmbit for
those types of remains. And Helen, you want to close us out,
thank you. Yeah. And I also I think get to mention this before,
but there's also a lot of fraud within these artifacts. There were there
were there were people that were hired to go into these museums and they were
experts on the certain culture and what their artifacts were, and they found that
there's frauds and copycats even with in museums and they say that they are authentic.
So also keep that in mind, you know, when we're talking about
these things, because there's a little part of my brain that's going are the
remains of the people that they say they're the remains of? I mean,
if there's you know, records back it up, I'm fine, But it's
just a little, you know, little thing that's floating around in my brave
brain. You know, because I'm a skeptic and you should be skeptical.
And on that note of being skeptical, if you want to become to learn
to be more skeptical, check out more from the nonpropit