American Museum of Natural History Repatriates 124 Human Remains

TheAmerican Museum of Natural History(AMNH) in New York has returned the remains of 124 Native people and ninety Native cultural objects. Museum president Sean Decatur in a July 25 letter to staff first quoted in theNew York Times, which broke the news, noted 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 included the aforementioned remains and items. The repatriations are part of the museum’s larger effort, announced earlier this year, to return the remains of 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of tribal funerary artifacts.

Among the returns are the remains of at least three members of California’s Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians. According to informationpublishedin the Federal Register, the remains of at least one ancestor were sold to the AMNH in 1891 by James Terry, one of the earliest curators in the museums’ anthropology department, then called the archaeological and ethnological department. At least two more sets of remains were sold to the institution in 1924 by Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan, whose entire collection of skulls and skeletons the AMNH would later purchase.

The repatriations arrive in the wake of federal revisions to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) made earlier this year. The changes reflected the Biden administration’s attempt to address long-standing complaints by tribal leaders that NAGPRA guidelines regarding the repatriation to tribes of ancestral remains, funerary artifacts, and other antiquities, allowed institutions to egregiously delay such returns. Upon the issuance of the revised protocol—which call for institutions to gain tribal consent before displaying or conducting research on a given tribe’s cultural artifacts or remains—the AMNH closed its Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains halls, which remain shuttered.

“As I’ve expressed before, the work before us will not be completed in a matter of months or even a few years,” wrote Decatur to his staff. “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.”