Collected across 150 years of acquisitions, donations, and expeditions, a majority of these remains originate from Indigenous or colonized communities and lack identification.
Among the 12,000 are the bodies of Black New Yorkers acquired from medical schools in the late 1940s.
The AMNH in New York City is repatriating the remains of 124 Native individuals and 90 Native cultural items as it faces increased pressure to return the thousands of human remains in its holdings.
The news follows an updated and stricter set of federal rules under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) that went into effect at the beginning of this year. Earlier, AMNH joined other museums in removing swaths of Indigenous artifacts from public view.
Today, many families of individuals in AMNH’s collections still have not received information about their ancestors’ whereabouts, according to recent reports.
