#aleš hrdlička

[a-modern-major-general]

The Smithsonian Institution holds human remains from more than 30,000 individuals in its collections. Most of these holdings—including bones, teeth, tissues and about 250 brains—were acquired in the 19th and early 20th centuries under dubious circumstances.

The charge of correcting these historical injustices now falls to 21st-century stewards. This week, the Smithsonian published a report from its Human Remains Task Force, which offered recommendations regarding the future of these holdings.

“We are committed to being a leader in all respects, and that means addressing the wrongs of our past by taking steps to ethically return collections and humanely steward any human remains in our care,” says Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III in a statement. “The work of repatriation began several decades ago, and we recognize that it requires a long-term commitment to complete. In recent months, we have made significant progress in this area.”

The long-anticipated report is the culmination of work conducted by the task force, which includes Smithsonian employees and outside experts, since its formation in April 2023. The group crafted Smithsonian-wide recommendations regarding the ethical return of human remains, which the Institution will ultimately use to create and implement new official policies. These changes will primarily affect the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), where the majority of these holdings reside, and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which houses the rest.

The recommendations emphasize that consent is a vital prerequisite for using human remains in any capacity. Going forward, the report advises, the Smithsonian should not collect, display or use remains for research purposes without the informed consent of the deceased or their descendants.

The Smithsonian should also offer to return remains taken without consent to the descendants of those individuals; per the task force, “reasonable efforts” should be made to locate those descendants. If no descendants can be found, the remains should be offered to appropriate community representatives or organizations. In cases where no community can be determined, the Smithsonian should create a process for respectfully burying the remains.

Like many other cultural institutions around the world, the Smithsonian has grappled in recent years with mounting pressure to expedite efforts to repatriate human remains. Last summer, the Washington Post published an investigation into the Smithsonian’s holdings—particularly those collected under the watch of Aleš Hrdlička, the Institution’s first curator of physical anthropology. Hrdlička harbored ambitions of proving now-debunked theories of white superiority known today as scientific racism.

Days later, the Post published an op-ed by Bunch addressing the investigation. It ran under the headline “This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance.” Bunch described Hrdlička’s legacy as “abhorrent and dehumanizing work [that was] carried out under the Smithsonian’s name.”

“As Secretary of the Smithsonian, I condemn these past actions and apologize for the pain caused by Hrdlička and others at the Institution who acted unethically in the name of science, regardless of the era in which their actions occurred,” Bunch wrote. “I recognize, too, that the Smithsonian is responsible both for the original work of Hrdlička and others who subscribed to his beliefs, and for the failure to return the remains he collected to descendant communities in the decades since.”

Bunch noted that the Smithsonian’s work to repatriate human remains goes back more than 30 years. Early efforts intensified after the 1989 passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act, which requires the Smithsonian to inventory its Native American human remains and repatriate them upon request.

“To date, we have focused on the repatriation of Native American remains to comply with federal law,” Bunch wrote. “The Smithsonian established its Human Remains Task Force to develop an institutional policy that addresses the future of all human remains still held in our collections.”

The Smithsonian has repatriated the remains of more than 5,000 individuals to date, with many thousands of human remains still to be processed. In a December follow-up to its initial investigation, the Post published a report in which former Smithsonian employees spoke of facing internal resistance on repatriating remains during the 1990s. Other staff from that period acknowledged that the process, by necessity, takes time to ensure the proper descendants receive the remains. The Post also cited a 2011 government report that said “it could take several more decades to complete” repatriating all the human remains in the collections.

In the new report, the task force suggests expediting returns under the NMAI Act, adding that NMAI and NMNH “should proactively engage descendants and tribes rather than waiting for them to initiate requests.” Because nearly half of the human remains still held by the Smithsonian are not covered by the NMAI Act, the report also recommends creating a repatriation team at NMNH that’s not linked to the law.

The changes arrive amid similar repatriation efforts nationwide. In January, new federal regulations requiring museums to “obtain free, prior and informed consent” from tribal officials before putting certain Native American artifacts on view went into effect. (This rule is an update to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which does not apply to the Smithsonian, though the new report notes that the 1990 law “enshrined many of the same principles” as the NMAI Act.)

“Historic inequities facilitated the expropriation, curation and unconsented use of human bodies,” writes the task force. “This is our unfortunate inheritance. … As the Smithsonian moves forward, it should do so thoughtfully and as rapidly as possible without doing further harm to individuals, families or communities.”

#history #current events #racism #colonialism #eugenics #anthropology #museums #native americans #usa #aleš hrdlička #smithsonian institution

[tlatollotl]

Anthropologists once excavated the graves of thousands of Native Americans. Now museums in the U.S. are slowly working to return those remains and funerary objects to tribes.

A village in southwest Alaska recently reburied 24 of their ancestors who had been excavated by a Smithsonian anthropologist in 1931.

About half of the village of Igiugig crowded into the Russian Orthodox Church in the center of town on a drizzly fall day. In the center of the nave sat three handmade, wooden coffins that held the bones from the now-abandoned settlement of Kaskanak.

The remains were unearthed by Aleš Hrdlička, who was the head of the anthropology department in what is now the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The question of how people originally came to North America and from where drove Hrdlička to dig up the bones of Native Americans all around the United States. Historians estimate that he took thousands to Washington, D.C., for research.

After more than eight decades in the museum's collection, Igiugig's ancestors finally returned home for reburial.

The community of Igiugig is majority Yupik, a people group native to Alaska.

Annie Wilson, an elder in the village, attended the funeral service and explained that Hrdlička's excavation was fundamentally objectionable in Yupik culture.

"We were always taught you don't dig up old bones of anything or anybody. That's their resting place until the good Lord comes someday," said Wilson.

Coffins carrying Igiugig ancestors are loaded onto a skiff for the final stretch of their journey, from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., to a burial ground in Alaska.

It took about two years after the village of Igiugig requested these remains for the repatriation to be approved. First the Smithsonian went through a process to verify that the people from Kaskanak were culturally affiliated with the people of Igiugig.

Bill Billeck, director of the Smithsonian's Repatriation Office, said the institution examined the remains as well as original documents, including Hrdlička's diaries. The museum also learned about the oral history of the Igiugig, which says that the ancestors of the current village had abandoned Kaskanak generations ago.

The institution also leaned heavily on the work of AlexAnna Salmon, an Igiugig local who has extensively researched the area's history.

"This was a collaborative effort between the Smithsonian and our village, but it was really us telling them that these are ours," Salmon said. "This is who we are. It's not anthropology coming from the other direction, telling you who you are and where you came from."

The Smithsonian is ostensibly an institution that collects artifacts, but returning pieces of its collection has become part of its duty in recent decades. The National Museum of the American Indian Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act require museums to make these materials available to federally recognized tribes. When those laws were passed in 1989 and 1990, museums around the United States held the remains of roughly 200,000 Native American individuals. The National Museum of Natural History held about 19,000 of those.

This year, the NMNH has returned the remains of 31 people, including the 24 from Kaskanak.

When the bones left the church after the funeral service, they had one more stretch of their journey. The coffins were loaded into a skiff, and the rest of the village piled into a few other boats.

This time, the bones were accompanied by the current director of the Smithsonian NMNH, Kirk Johnson. He reflected on the importance of his museum's repatriation work to tribes nationwide.

"Some of their grandparents or their more recent relatives are actually in museums as collection items, which just doesn't make much sense from a human point of view," Johnson said. "There is something that is very unfair that was done here, and we want the tribes, groups or corporations to be able to petition to have their bodies or their funerary objects returned to them."

At the site, a hole was already dug on the hillside overlooking the Kvichak River. The priest prayed as the coffins were lowered. Then he sprinkled dirt into the graves with a long-handled shovel. He passed the shovel to Johnson. Alongside Johnson, the children of Igiugig tossed in dirt by the handful. The rest of the village pitched in, and soon only three white crosses and a fresh pile of soil marked the grave.

After the bones were laid to rest, the village performed a yuraq, a traditional Yupik dance. Facing east with dance fans held high, voices raised and drums beating loudly, they blessed their ancestors and reclaimed two dozen members of their community.

#native american #first nations #indigenous #alaska #yupik #nagpra #human remains #Igiugig #history

[sensitivefern]

New York, September [1969]. Saturday night... I explored West 42nd St. again; saw a dreadful double feature: The Magus and The Libertine. Walking home, evan at that short distance, I found extremely difficult. I bought a Sunday Times, which was terribly heavy, and scrapped half of it in a trash can, then went into the next movie I passed, to go to the men’s room, without noticing what it was; but when I was coming out I saw on the screen a huge close-up of a woman’s cunt. It was horrible... like something raw and unappetizing in a butcher’s shop. The woman was rhythmically wriggling and caressing herself and opening her cunt with her fingers... Then there was another more elaborate film... Among scenes of lesbianism and cocksucking, with the lower party out of the picture, there was a rapist who committed three successful rapes; in the case of the last woman who was sitting in her bath, he drowned her by lifting up her legs so that her head was under the water, then carried her nude to a garbage dump and dumped her. He was made an unattractive character and finally shot; but this kind of thing ought really to be censored: it shows the young delinquents how easy it would be to slug a girl and rape her and get away with it.

[Edmund Wilson]

===

Charles Abbott was thrilled when his associate Ernest Volk dug up a human femur deep in the gravel of the farm. Volk had spent a decade searching for Ice Age humans in New Jersey. Gloating that his new discovery was ‘the key to it all’, Volk sent the bone for examination to a physical anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička... Volk’s femur looked anatomically contemporary. But even if it had looked different, Hrdlička said, that wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ancestors of indians walked New Jersey thousands of years ago. Volk and Abbott would also have to prove that the bone was old... Only if the archaeological context – the dirt and rock around the find – was established as ancient could the bone be classified as ancient too.

In the next quarter century amateur bone hunter discovered dozens of what they believed to be ancient skeletons in what they believed to be ancient sediments. One by one Hrdlička... shot them down. The skeletons are completely modern, he would say. And the sediments around them were too disturbed to ascertain their age. People dig graves, he reminded the buffs. You should assume from the outset that if you find a skeleton six feet deep in the earth that the bones are a lot newer than the dirt around them.

With his stern gaze, scowling moustache, and long, thick hair that swept straight back from the forehead, Hrdlička was the very image of celluloid-collar Authority... By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics...

[1491]

====

Oct. 30 [1855]. Wednesday. Going to the new cemetery, I see that the scarlet oak leaves have still some brightness; perhaps the latest of the oaks.

END OF VOLUME VII

===

EDUCATION

Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the worst job in the world is the schoolmaster. Both are underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying to perform the impossible. How much the world asks of them, and how little they can actually deliver! The clergyman's business is to save the human race from hell: if he saves one-eighth of one per cent., even within the limits of his narrow flock, he does magnificently. The school-master's is to spread the enlightenment, to make the great masses of the plain people intelligent – and intelligence is precisely the thing that the great masses of the plain people are congenitally and eternally incapable of.

Is it any wonder that the poor birchman, facing this labor that would have staggered Sisyphus Æolusohn, seeks refuge from its essential impossibility in a Chinese maze of empty technic?

[H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, Third Series]

===

In ascending stairwell B, firefighters were passing a steady and heavy stream of descending civilians. [...] Firefighters periodically stopped on particular floors and searched to ensure that no civilians were still on it. In a few instances healthy civilians were found on floors, either because they still were collecting personal items or for no apparent reason; they were told to evacuate immediately.

[The 9/11 Report]

===

baneberry | Actaea ‘Observers note that toads seem attracted by the plant’s odor’.

===

love-lies-bleeding ‘In summer and early autumn, the flowers of Amaranthus caudatus ‘Viridis’ bring an air of exoticism to the temperate garden’... the flowers start out ‘an arresting electric-green’ before fading to cream, them transforming to multicolored seedheads... this variety is said to be good for pots and hanging baskets; also a short-lived houseplant... ‘Makes a great cut flower; remove the lower leaves and sear stems for twenty seconds in boiling water before plunging them into cold water. The stems can also be dried for winter colour’... also recommended: A. cruentus ‘Towers Green’; A. hypochondriacus ‘Green Thumb’... ‘The seeds of certain Amaranthus species such as A. hypochondriacus contain twice as much calcium as milk. They can be eaten raw or cooked, or even “popped” in much the same way as popcorn. The grains offer a rare complete source of plant protein and are also a good source of iron, magnesium and fibre’.

[Green Flowers]

===

❚Sarah Silverman woke up this morn w a swollen top lip! Took a benedryl& nothing! Is it a sting? Allergy? Has this happened to any1? Feels numbish.??

John Coltrane's 'Interstellar Space' at 50: Legacy of a free-jazz masterpiece

Today would've been Johnny Cash's 85th birthday

The Rolling Stones - No Expectations

'People's Court' Judge Joseph Wapner Dead at 97

Bill Paxton, a Hollywood mainstay, dead at 61

Die 89. Academy Awards - Bricht „La La Land“ heute den Oscar-Rekord?

'O.J.: Made in America' becomes first TV show to win an Oscar

Jimmy Kimmel sticks it to Donald Trump in Oscars opening monologue

Hide your sports memorabilia - OJ Simpson to be released from prison as early as October

Let the record show that we didn’t make it even 10 minutes into the Oscars telecast before someone slipped up and mentioned the year’s most famous nonexistent movie: Hidden Fences.

[the-two-germanys]

The La Chapelle-aux-Saints skull. Side view. The Most Ancient Skeletal Remains of Man Aleš Hrdlička Washington: Government Printing Office, 1916.

#skulls #la chapelle aux saints #Aleš Hrdlička

[the-two-germanys]

The gravel bed at Piltdown, from the darkest stratum of which, resting on the bedrock, the fossil human skull and jaw were obtained. The Most Ancient Skeletal Remains of Man Aleš Hrdlička Washington: Government Printing Office, 1916.

#Piltdown Man #hoax #Aleš Hrdlička #archaeology