Inside the Smithsonian's "Racial Brain Collection" & the Eugenics Project Behind It

we end Today's Show looking at a major investigation by The Washington Post that reveal the Smithsonian institution holds a so-called racial brain collection that contains 255 brains gathered in the first half of the 20th century much of it was collected at the behest of a racist Anthropologist who is trying to scientifically prove the superiority of white people an investigation by The Washington Post found most of the brains in the Smithsonian Collection were removed from dead black and Indigenous people and other people of color often taken without consent from their families in a moment we'll be joined by the two reporters behind this investigation Nicole Dunka and Claire Healey but we begin with an excerpt of a video produced by The Washington Post in a cemetery in St Louis at least six Filipinos are buried they died at the 1904 World's Fair Jonna and the Nuevo lingos started searching for their graves in 2021 after reading about them in archival newspapers well I think they deserve to be remembered this whole investigation began in February 2022 when I came across Jonna's Instagram and I was going to write about her work to find the places that these people were buried and then she shared a record with me that said four of those people had their brains removed and taken to the Smithsonian once I heard about the Filipino aspect of this story I got really interested in working with Claire on this lingholtz's Discovery would inspire a year-long investigation into the smithsonian's collections of human remains I had already been researching Filipinos that were part of this exhibit like put on exhibition who had died at the 1904 World's Fair and I came across a catalog online from the Smithsonian they had listings of things that they had acquired from St Louis either during or after the fair and then I asked the Smithsonian how many brands do you have and why and they sent me a spreadsheet of all the brains that they have with locality and what's called an accession number I went to the Smithsonian institution archives and took each of these numbers and got the original accession cards so these are the cards that are filed away every time a new body part was entered into a collection at the Smithsonian and we built up a database of those there were children in the collection there were men and women and then fetuses many of them were indigenous people other people of color and many of them didn't have their identities actually recorded partly because they were looked at as specimens the Smithsonian currently has 255 human brains in a storage facility in Maryland records suggest only four of those brains were collected with consent that was a video report by The Washington Post to a company its major new investigation revealing the smithsonian's racial brain collection while the post was reporting on the story The Smithsonian formed a task force to develop a policy to address the future of human remains held within its Museum's collections the Smithsonian secretary Lani Bunch said quote at the Smithsonian we recognize certain collection practices of our past were unethical what was once standard in the museum field is no longer acceptable we acknowledge and apologize for the pain our historical practices have caused people their families and their communities Lonnie bunch is also the former head of the smithsonian's national museum of African American history and culture joining us now are the Washington post's Claire Healey and Nicole Dunka who is also the president of the Asian American journalists Association we welcome you both to democracy Now Claire why don't you lay out the scope of this project and take it from where um you were both speaking in this video report sure I mean to start we started looking at the brain collection which as you said has 255 brains and that's just what they have today like we found evidence that they had 268 overall and some were cremated and four were patrioted but that's just a fraction of what they actually have in human remains total they have 30 700 sets of human remains and to give you a sense of what that means each of those numbers is a set of human remains not an individual and so the number of people who are in this collection is actually higher than that thirty thousand 30 000 comes from 80 countries at least around the world all right name the anthropologists talk about his motivations and where he went all over the world to gather these skulls overwhelmingly not given by families not given with consent sure Alice herlichka was the head curator of the division of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian and when he started at the Smithsonian in 1903 he set out creating a massive Network that would collect these remains on his behalf and so he would send people to South Africa to the Philippines to gather remains for him and send them back to the Smithsonian and he believed in white superiority and so when he was collecting these remains he wanted to research race and the physical differences that he saw between races but he was also looking into human Origins and the origins of people in the Americas and so 15 000 of these remains are estimated to be Native American and he was looking at the origins of people in the Americas but also all of his studies would come consistently back to looking at race and you talk about how he's not even referring to his own research as he tries to lay out the basis of his theory of white superiority he was just spouting the standard Eugenics line at the time yes so we couldn't find actual studies he did on these brains a lot of the studies he put out were on the brain specifically he did a study on brain preservatives but he didn't put out anything on comparing race in the way that he said he wanted to but he would still answer letters he would still tell newspapers that you know white brains show some superiority to Black brains but he wouldn't reference any studies he did and as far as we can tell he didn't do those studies I want to bring Nicole Duncan into this conversation the reporter on this incredible series then that's incredible investigation you're also president of the Asian American journalists Association um and you're a Filipina American talk about the Filipino brains in this collection and how you got involved with this story yeah thank you so much for having me as we said in that video you know when I heard about the Filipinos involved in this collection I immediately knew that we needed to make this a big story um and that's because so much of the history between the Philippines and the US many people don't know so actually four of these brains had actually come from Filipinos who had been brought to the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis and there there had been what was essentially a human Zoo a Living Museum exhibit where people would flock to St Louis and see how indigenous Filipinos and other Filipinos were living they lived in mock Villages and they would do their daily chores and they and people would say these people were primitive or that they were Savages and bear officials actually pressured the igoro people that is a term that Bradley talks about into indigenous Filipinos who live in the Cordillera region of Luzon they would pressure these indigenous Filipinos to eat dogs even though that happened very rarely back home and so that exacerbated a stereotype that lingers to this day and so what we actually found is that some of these Filipinos died while they were at the fair or on the way here from the Philippines and what Alice herlichka knew was that he could go there and actually take some of their brains and so what we found is that herdlichka went to St Louis in 1904 and he autopsied two Filipinos and two other Filipinos had their brain sent to him later but one of them was likely a woman named Maura and we created an illustrated narrative about her life and her death with illustrations from a Filipino base or philippine-based artist named Ren galeno because we wanted to really show that fare from the perspective of the Filipinos we dug deep into newspaper archives and we saw you know many articles where they were referring to them as Savages they were talking about their Customs as if they were very strange and we really wanted to create something that would show the perspectives of the Filipinos because so many of those perspectives had gotten lost and just to be clear the U.S had occupied the Philippines from 1898 for what the next half century until 1946. yes and so I think actually the previous segments really talked about being able to teach people the history some of the dark chapters of the US history and a lot of people don't know that the Philippines was a territory and that this was something that really affected how people saw Filipinos and actually William Howard Taft was using the fair basically to show that the U.S was good for the Philippines and that was partly why they were bringing these indigenous Filipinos they were saying look how we can help them look how they are primitive can you tell us Nicole um uh Claire about Mary Sarah her family Sami from indigenous to areas that include Northern Scandinavia yes so Mary Sarah was an 18 year old zombie woman from Alaska and she died in Seattle in 1933 of tuberculosis she had gone to Seattle with her mother for her mother to get cataract surgery and the Doctor Who was doing the cataract surgery on her mother then took her brain and sent it to the Smithsonian and so he sent on the day that she died he sent a telegram to Alice herlichka saying if you want a Sami brain I can get one for you today and so when we reached out to her first cousin in Alaska she had no idea that this had happened and so let's talk about what's going to happen now I just read a quote from the head of the Smithsonian he Lonnie Bunch was the founding director of the smithsonian's national museum of African American history and culture and then became the head of the whole Smithsonian he's saying this is unethical talk about um how the Smithsonian has responded over this year and what they have set up so as you noted he did apologize for how these remains were collected in the past and he has put together a task force that has already met three times to try to look at these human remains and how to return them and how to move forward he said that he's going to look to the task force to decide that best way of moving forward whether that's contacting individual families or as he suggested doing some sort of mass grave is what he said in Arlington Cemetery and so he's going to look at what the task force wants him to do and the Smithsonian has also reached out to the Embassy of the Philippines to repatriate the Filipino remains months after we started reporting and so conversations are underway to look into repatriating those remains Nicole Duncan where are the remains being held now are medical professionals able to access this and also the fact that this is global we're not just talking about skulls and brains from the United States and what this means how the International Community has responded they're being held right now in the museum supports us so you Museum support center of the Smithsonian institution and that's in Suitland Maryland um and actually at the beginning of the year Lonnie Bunch III the secretary of the Smithsonian restricted access to human remains but what we do know is that there is the ability to be researching some of these remains if two top Smithsonian officials sign off on this there are still anthropologists who would be able to access this uh but they are creating policies that will that will be able to say this is what you can do in terms of collecting human remains it has to be consensual or this is the kind of research that you will be able to do and Claire Haley can you talk about the significance of the largest group um black people the skulls and fetuses of black people how they were classified which makes it more difficult to repatriate them right so the only law in place um that the Smithsonian is under is the nmai act and this requires the Smithsonian to send out inventories of its Native American remains to federally recognized tribes and so that doesn't cover other um populations and demographics within this collection and it doesn't cover black Americans and so a lot of the black Americans whose remains are in this collection their families would have no idea and the Smithsonian isn't obligated to reach out to any of them or to even release publicly an inventory and so we don't really have a sense of how they're going to move forward in informing families and looking into how to address those remains but we also know that black Americans was a population that herlichka specifically targeted he talks about that in his writings and in his manual in 1904 that he puts out in looking for human remains and so as we know in the article people the largest racial group in the United States that was that had brains taken was black Americans and it's unclear what the Smithsonian will do about that

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 80,317

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, News, Politics, democracynow, Independent Media, Breaking News, World News

Id: P-muMPJle8M

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023