Politixia
Mary Sara was fully Sami, and so her brain was sent to the nation’s capital — without her family’s consent. There, it joined a collection that ultimately totaled 268 human brains and some 30,700 other body parts, the vast majority of which have sat in storage in Maryland for decades, wrapped in muslin and soaked in preservatives. That the Smithsonian holds such a collection, as do many other natural history museums that have been continuously operating since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is not necessarily surprising. But a groundbreaking Post investigation by Nicole Dungca, Claire Healy and Andrew Ba Tran revealed, in gruesome detail, the most exhaustive analysis to date of the holdings in that collection. The report underscores the urgency for museums to account for their holdings publicly and, where possible, to return these remains to the families and the communities from which they were taken.
During the course of The Post’s investigation, the Smithsonian formally apologized for the way in which the taxpayer-funded institution had amassed its collection of human remains and created a task force to decide how best to deal with the specimens it currently houses. “Let us be clear that this is not acceptable and that we need to find ways to make amends,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III told The Post. “We need to figure out how we make clear who [Hrdlicka] was but also that whole field of scientific racism, what its impact was.” As the Smithsonian embarks on this monumental and long-overdue undertaking, peer institutions offer plenty of precedent for how to deal with this legacy in both the short and long term.
At the Smithsonian and elsewhere, the problem with human remains in museum collections is ultimately about evaluating whether 19th-century acquisitions live up to 21st-century medical ethics. Judging that question and whether particular specimens were lawfully acquired or stolen from indigenous communities in an era when there was little oversight is often a long, drawn-out process. But even while those crucial investigations are underway, museum leaders can assess whether their institutions are doing everything possible to treat the human remains in their collections with dignity and respect.
At the moment, Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum is embroiled in bitter controversy after a new generation of museum leadership rightly called for ethical reviews of the remains on display, as not all of the specimens, especially those collected in the 19th century from enslaved people, Native Americans and other disenfranchised groups, came from people who had the opportunity to consent to having their body parts displayed in perpetuity. Although a number of donors and museum loyalists have taken aim at the Mütter’s new president and executive director, accusing them of a having a “woke” agenda, Mütter leadership was correct to take down a popular YouTube series that showcased human remains from the collection. Officials were also in the right when they convened a panel of experts to investigate whether the sources of the remains in question had genuinely consented to such exposure and whether any more crucial context could be learned about their lives.
A second question to ask is about public displays and expositions. After all, the mere existence of many of these collections is a legacy of colonial racism, of a Western superpower exploiting communities overseas even to the point of carting off their dead to shock and delight museumgoers back home. This is less relevant to the Smithsonian, as these items are not on display. But display is an issue at the heart of other similar controversies elsewhere. Until 2020, for instance, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, displayed the Shuar tsantsa, or shrunken heads of the Shuar people, that it had acquired between 1884 and 1936. In a time when museums and other cultural institutions pay more attention to social justice, the Pitt Rivers took them off display and “is now working with Shuar partners to redress this situation.”
Finally, the most important question to ask, in the event that human remains were illegally acquired or stolen, is about how to return them where possible. There are a number of good examples of such restitutions, the strongest of which is likely the Charité in Berlin. In 2014, the institution, after careful research, returned the remains of 14 Indigenous people taken in the late 19th century from Australia’s Torres Strait Islands and the western part of the country to representatives of the Goemulgal and Wajarri Yamatji peoples. The museum similarly repatriated other human remains to Namibia in 2011 and 2014 and Paraguay in 2012.
This is not to say that the research value of certain specimens is irrelevant. Although research institutions such as the Smithsonian would never collect specimens in the same way today, there still can be benefits from continuing to study material regardless of how it was acquired. The case of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells provided the source of the HeLa cell line, is a good example: Before she died at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, Lacks gave no consent about her cells being extracted for scientific study during a biopsy, but they’ve nevertheless provided future generations of scientists with crucial data. The Smithsonian’s holdings have likewise been used for research purposes. Yet the Lacks case is tough because her cells are used in important medical research. The practical value of the Smithsonian specimens is not as compelling.
The Smithsonian should return its specimens with all due care, as other institutions have. There are surviving family members who deserve to receive the remains of their ancestors that, in some instances, they never even knew were taken. Mary Sara’s family is no exception. Among the most devastating parts of The Post’s investigation is an interview with her first cousin, Martha Sara Jack, and her husband, Fred Jack, who live in Wasilla, Alaska, and were unaware that her brain had been in storage all these years. Martha Sara Jack showed The Post a pair of mukluks, intricate creations of reindeer skin, that Mary Sara had made. “It’s a violation against our family and against our people” her husband said. “It’s kind of like an open wound.”
That wound might never heal, but at the very least, the Smithsonian, the world’s largest complex of museums and research centers, has an obligation to begin to close it.
