NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) — The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is scrutinizing nearly 12,000 human remains in its collection, some of which were acquired through grave robbing practices involving Black and Native Americans, according to reports.
The plan comes after concerns over the museum's practices and the ethical considerations surrounding the many remains in its vast collection.
Sean M. Decatur, the museum's president, explained in a recent letter to staff obtained by The New York Times, "Human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power. Moreover, 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.”
As part of the new policy, the museum will take down all currently displayed human bones and enhance the storage facilities for these remains. Anthropologists will also dedicate more effort to investigating the collection, aiming to identify the origins and identities of the remains.
Erin Thompson, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, raised concerns about the museum's "medical collection," which included remains of New Yorkers who had died as recently as the 1940s. Thompson's research efforts were met with resistance from the museum.
"To me, that's like a red flag,” Thompson told WCBS 880. “If a museum has something that it's not telling you the details about, that's a sign that they might be hiding something. So I started to dig.”
The museum's displays contain a wide range of remains, including a reconstructed skeleton of a 1000 AD Mongolian warrior and a Tibetan apron from the 19th century made of human bones.
However, the most notable exhibits feature skeletons taken from graves across New York, including those of five Black adults from a Manhattan cemetery for enslaved people in 1903, according to the NYT.
"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 NYT.
The museum also maintains a "medical collection" consisting of about 400 individuals, primarily from lower-income backgrounds, who died in the 1940s.
These remains were initially given to medical schools and later transferred to the museum, a move that some legal scholars argue was likely illegal.
The largest portion of the collection has 2,200 Native American remains, which the museum was required to return to their rightful descendants under the Native-American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The identification of tribes has been slow, although the museum has returned 1,000 skeletons in the last 30 years.
Decatur's letter stated that "none of the items on display are so essential to the goals and narrative of the exhibition as to counterbalance the ethical dilemmas presented by the fact that human remains are in some instances exhibited alongside and on the same plane as objects."
He added, "These are ancestors and are in some cases victims of violent tragedies or representatives of groups who were abused and exploited, and the act of public exhibition extends that exploitation."