Dear Members of the HMS and HSDM Community:
Today Harvard President Lawrence Bacow shared the final report of the Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections. It represents the committee’s work to:
- undertake archival research on the remains of the now 19 individuals who were enslaved or were likely to have been enslaved, as identified in the review by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and consider options for the return of these remains, as well as their burial or reburial, commemoration, and memorialization;
- create a comprehensive survey of human remains present across all University museum collections, as well as their use in current teaching and research;
- develop a University-wide policy on the collection, display, and ethical stewardship of human remains in the University’s museum collections; and
- propose principles and practices that address research, community consultation, memorialization, possible repatriation, burial or reburial, and other care considerations.
I encourage you to read the report, which includes recommendations in six areas that reflect the charge to the committee: human remains of individuals who were enslaved or were likely to have been enslaved, return of other human remains in Harvard collections, ethical care, research and teaching, community consultation, and memorialization. In addition, this Gazette story features a Q&A with steering committee chair Evelynn Hammonds and members Allan Brandt and Philip Deloria.
Importantly, as Dr. Hammonds writes in the report’s afterword, “… this must be the end of the beginning of the necessary work that Harvard University must do to face the history of its collection, display, research, and stewardship practices in its museums, especially with respect to human remains.”
The overwhelming majority of human remains at Harvard are stewarded by the Peabody Museum and HMS’ Warren Anatomical Museum. Part of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, the Warren Museum was long central to medical education at HMS and is one of the last surviving anatomy and pathology museum collections in the U.S. As the University considers its relationships to slavery and colonialism, HMS must continue to reflect on the nature of the Warren Museum’s collection and the contexts in which — and manner by which — human remains became part of it.
Since 2016, the Warren Museum and Center for the History of Medicine have been investigating the relationship of its collections to slavery and scientific racism. Although there are no known extant human remains of enslaved individuals in the Warren Museum collections, much work is still to be done to examine these relationships and the collection. For more information on the Warren Museum and this work, read this Q&A with Museum Curator Dominic Hall, who is also a member of the steering committee.
HMS and the Warren Museum deeply value our continued partnership with the Peabody Museum on repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the acceleration of this process. We are also grateful for the recommendation to establish a University-wide returns committee that will consider, on a case-by-case basis, the return of human remains not covered by NAGPRA.
I share my deep respect for and gratitude to Dr. Hammonds and all members of the steering committee — including HMS representatives Allan Brandt, Dominic Hall, Willy Lensch, Scott Podolsky, and Bob Truog — for their thoughtful and important work. In closing, I want to share this line from Philip Deloria’s essay in the report, which I found particularly moving:
“We question, debate, condemn, and sometimes absolve our predecessors, realizing that while we may not be responsible for their history, we are very much responsible to it. History is not inert; it demands action.”
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard Medical School