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.
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. 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.
“Enslavement was a violent, dehumanizing act; removing these remains from their rightful burial place ensured that the denial of basic human dignity would continue even in death,” Decatur said in his letter to the museum staff.
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