The Washington Post spent a year examining the Smithsonian’s collection of human remains, including 255 brains. Reporters reviewed thousands of documents, including studies, field notes and personal correspondence, and interviewed experts, Smithsonian officials, and descendants and members of communities whose remains were targeted for collection. The Post also obtained from the National Museum of Natural History an inventory of all human remains in its possession, which allowed reporters to publish the most extensive analysis of the collection to date.
The Smithsonian’s collection of human remains is one of the largest in the world. It includes mummies, skulls and teeth, representing an unknown number of people. It also has a collection of brains, which were taken mostly from Black, Indigenous people and other people of color.
The remains are the unreconciled legacy of a grisly practice in which body parts were scavenged from graveyards, battlefields, hospitals and morgues in more than 80 countries.
Most of the remains appear to have been gathered without consent from the individuals or their families, by researchers preying on people who were hospitalized, poor, or lacked immediate relatives to identify or bury them. In other cases, collectors, anthropologists and scientists dug up burial grounds and looted graves.
The story began in a St. Louis cemetery, where at least six Filipinos are buried. They had come from the Philippines to be put on display at the 1904 World’s Fair, living in model villages for onlookers to gawk at their customs. They never returned home.
