One of the Big Apple’s most iconic museums is ditching its collection of some 12,000 human remains — claiming the institution followed racist practices by robbing the graves of Indigenous and black peoples.
The American Museum of Natural History will remove one dozen exhibits currently on display in order for examination to determine their origins and identities, according to an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.
“Human remains collections were made possible by extreme imbalances of power,” Sean M. Decatur, who became the museum’s president in April, told his staff in a letter this week.
“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.”
The premiere museum has bones and remains littered throughout its halls — including a completely reconstructed skeleton of a 1000 AD Mongolian warrior and a Tibetan apron from the 19th century made of human bones.
The more problematic collections, however, are comprised of skeletons dug and stolen from graves across the city and state.
One such collection is the bones of five Black adults that were stolen from a Manhattan cemetery for enslaved people in 1903, the NYT reported.
Construction workers who stumbled upon the colonial-era bodies while building the Inwood neighborhood piled the skulls to form a pyramid and snapped a picture of what Decatur described as a desecration.
“Certainly as an African American, the question of race is one of particular interest,” Decatur told the paper.
“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.”
The museum also holds a “medical collection” of some 400 sick and largely poor New Yorkers who died in the 1940s and turned over to medical schools before being handed to the AMNH in what some legal scholars said was likely an illegal move.
Its largest collection — and what has drawn the most criticism — is the remains of 2,200 Native Americans.
The AMNH was mandated to return the bones to their rightful descendants three decades ago under the Native-American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but has been slow to identify the tribes.
It has, however, returned 1,000 skeletons in the last 30 years.
The museum’s new policy will order that the remains be adequately cared for inside the institution until they are approved to be returned.
“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,” Decatur said in his letter.
“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.”
