American Museum of Natural History to Remove All Human Remains from Public Display

Changes prompted by concerns over grave disruptions, power imbalances in the collection process, and lack of consent from the deceased or their descendants, aiming towards respectful handling and repatriations.

• The American Museum of Natural History is removing all human remains from public display in response to concerns about grave disruptions and lack of consent. This process will affect six of the museum's galleries.
• The museum's collection, featuring around 12,000 sets of remains, includes bones of Indigenous people and enslaved Black individuals, collected mainly during the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these were gathered without clear consent from the deceased or their descendants.
• Presidential leader of the museum, Sean Decatur, stated that there was typically a clear power differential between the collectors and the collected, highlighting the lack of respect and consent involved in the collection process.
• The museum plans to repatriate as many remains as possible, practicing more respectful handling of unreturnable items. About 2,200 sets of the remains are covered by a US law passed in 1990, which allows Native tribes to reclaim ancestral remains from institutions.
• The collection includes about 400 bodies from four New York medical schools in the 1940s. This common practice reflected long-standing assumptions about social status, with unclaimed bodies, typically of the very poor, made available to medical schools.

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