NY museum pulls human remains from display

NEW YORK

The American Museum of Natural History announced this month that it is pulling all human remains from public display and will change how it maintains its collection of body parts with the aim of eventually repatriating as much as it can and respectfully holding what it can’t.

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.

American Museum of Natural History President Sean Decatur, who in April became the museum’s first Black leader, said that for the most part, the remains in the collection were acquired without clear consent of the dead or their descendants.

“I think it’s fair to say that none of these people set out or imagined that their resting place would be in the museum’s collection,” he said. “And in most of the cases, there also was a clear differential in power between those who were collecting and those who were collected.”

The process of pulling human remains from public display will impact six of the museum's galleries. Objects being removed include a musical instrument made from human bone, a skeleton from Mongolia that is more than a thousand years old and a Tibetan artifact that incorporates bones.

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. At the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, for example, more than 100 human remains have been returned to the relevant communities.

The museum is working to return four other sets of remains that don't fall under the federal law's purview.

In 2022, an estimated 870,000 Native American artifacts, including remains that should be returned to tribes under federal law are still in possession of colleges, museums, and other institutions across the country, according to The Associated Press.