The American Museum of Natural History said it was making progress on returning the human remains of nearly 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of tribal funerary objects, which became a top priority earlier this year in the wake of new federal regulations.
In a staff letter on Thursday afternoon, the museum’s president, Sean Decatur, provided an update. He said that the institution “has held more than 400 consultations, with approximately 50 different stakeholders, including hosting seven visits of Indigenous delegations, and eight completed repatriations,” which includes 124 individuals and 90 objects.
The remains of at least three individuals were announced for return to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians in California. According to information published in the Federal Register, the museum bought one set of human remains in 1891 from James Terry, one of the earliest curators of the institution’s anthropology department, then known as the archaeological and ethnological department. In 1924, the remains of at least two other individuals were purchased from Felix von Luschan, an Austrian anthropologist who eventually sold his entire collection of skulls and skeletons to the museum, which some historians believe doubled its holdings of human remains at the time.
Earlier this year, the museum closed two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, largely in response to new federal regulations that required museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items. The updates were part of the Biden administration’s effort to close loopholes in the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for the return of human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. For decades, tribal representatives had criticized the law as providing museums and other institutions with the means to drag out the repatriation process.
The museum’s galleries for the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains remain closed.
In his letter, Decatur said that the curator David Hurst Thomas and an outside Indigenous adviser would help organize a small exhibition opening in October that discusses the museum’s new strategic mission around cultural storytelling, including a history of NAGPRA and the perspective of Indigenous communities. Additionally, the museum will debut a new field trip experience for New York City students that was developed alongside advisers from the Haudenosaunee community.
Less progress has been made in the museum’s so-called medical collection, which has the remains of some 400 largely poor New Yorkers who died in the 1940s and whose unclaimed bodies were initially given to medical schools. They are part of the museum’s larger collection of some 12,000 remains that come from around the world. A museum spokeswoman said that outreach is ongoing to institutions that might have a stake in the collection, and there is an effort to improve the stewardship of the human remains collection.
“As I’ve expressed before, the work before us will not be completed in a matter of months or even a few years,” Decatur said in his staff letter. “But, thanks to the efforts of many across the museum and outside advisers, we will continue to move forward on lasting and substantive changes to our policies, practices and approaches.”
Read More: Museum of Natural History Says It Is Repatriating 124 Human Remains
