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Spent a afternoon at the Smithsonian and noticed something odd about the human remains display
I was at the Natural History museum in DC last Tuesday and stopped by the bone hall. They have this huge collection of indigenous skeletal remains from the 1800s with no real explanation of how they got there. I overheard a docent telling a tour group that most were collected without permission and now the museum can't return them because they lost the paperwork. Has anyone else seen this and wondered why it's still up?
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the_cole6d ago
I used to be one of those people who defended museums having all this stuff. Like I thought it was important for education and science and whatever. But then I read about the Navajo cultural objects at the American Museum of Natural History that they literally had on display until some tribes sued to get them back. It changed my whole view. If they can't prove how they got these bones or who gave permission back then, that's basically stolen property sitting in a glass case. The docent basically admitted they messed up by losing the papers. That's not just bad record keeping, that's a cover up of something shady that happened a hundred years ago. I honestly think they should take them off display until they can trace where each one came from and actually talk to the descendant communities.
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julia_patel6d ago
Good point @the_cole, and what about museums returning stuff to help heal old wounds with living communities today?
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