The American Museum of Natural History in New York has announced its decision to remove all human remains from public display. The removal will impact thousands of remains.
There are stories in the human bones at the American Museum of Natural History. They tell of lives lived — some mere decades ago, others in past centuries — in cultures around the world. But the vast collection of thousands of skeletal parts at one of the world's most visited museums also tells a darker story – of opened graves, disrupted burial sites and collecting practices that treated some cultures and people as objects to be gawked at.
The museum now holds around 12,000 sets of remains, including the bones of Indigenous people and enslaved Black people, often amassed in the 19th and 20th centuries by researchers looking to prove theories about racial superiority and inferiority through physical attributes. Some of the other remains are people — likely poor or powerless — whose bodies had once been used at medical schools before they were given to the museum as recently as the 1940s.
The idea that human remains and artifacts taken from other cultures should be returned is not new. A U.S. law passed in 1990 created a legal process for some Native tribes to recover ancestral remains from museums and other institutions. In a letter to museum staff, Decatur said about 2,200 sets of remains at the museum fall under that category. Other museums and institutions are grappling with the issue as well.
Historically, Black graves have been subjected to robbery, said Lynn Rainville, a professor of anthropology at Washington and Lee University. They have also been covered over or disrupted in construction and development projects.
States passed laws making unclaimed bodies, mostly of very poor people, available to medical schools. 'It reflects longstanding assumptions about the differences between middle-class and either working-class or underclass people' that it was deemed acceptable to turn certain bodies over but not others, she said. The practice at most medical schools shifted in the second half of the 20th century for a number of reasons, including more people in the U.S.
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