STOLEN HUMANITY ON DISPLAY: LACKING LEGISLATION FOR HUMAN REMAINS IN U.S. MUSEUMS

Authors

Sarah M. Fassio

Abstract

In museums across the United States, displays of human remains are not rarities. Yet few attendees stop to consider the provenance behind those once-living parts of our ancestors. To do so, one would have to contend with an unpleasant history rife with scientific racism and graverobbing for the personal collections of society’s upper crust. Considering the origins of such displays reveals that the labels and names attached to human remains in museums often serve more to alienate them from their humanity than they do to connect or contextualize.

Legal regulations pertaining to displayed human remains are piecemeal. There are federal protections for Native American human remains (as well as sacred and funerary objects) through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, enacted in 1989 and most recently amended in January of 2024. However, these protections do not apply to the human remains belonging to non-Native communities of color. To state the obvious, taking human remains of any origin without consent is illegal. This is true in all fifty states. Yet through a combination of wealth, societal privilege, and racist ideologies, graves and mortuaries throughout the country were pillaged for human remains over decades, displayed first in private collections and research institutions and later donated to museums across the nation. Many of those remains are still housed in museums today, if not on active display, then behind the closed doors of institutional storage.

Decades later, the question of how to reconcile with stolen human remains looms largely unanswered. However, within the last five years, there has been international legislation and domestic legal precedent in support of reburial or repatriation of non-Native human remains. In 2023, France passed a law allowing the restitution of foreign human remains in public collections. In the United States, a 2023 decision by the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court granted legal consent to the reburial of certain non-Native human remains. Following that decision, the remains of over a dozen Black Philadelphians formerly held in the Penn Museum’s Morton Collection were buried and laid to rest. There has also been encouraging trends towards greater transparency with human remains databases. Legal repatriation, reburial, and restitution is possible for the wrongfully gathered human remains in United States museums.

Recommended Citation

Sarah M. Fassio, STOLEN HUMANITY ON DISPLAY: LACKING LEGISLATION FOR HUMAN REMAINS IN U.S. MUSEUMS, 20 Wash. J. L. Tech. & Arts (2025).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wjlta/vol20/iss3/4