The American Museum of Natural History, home to a famous model whale and gem collection as well as a gleaming planetarium on the Upper West Side of New York, has made plans to repatriate hair samples taken from Native Americans in the 19th century as part of spurious scientific studies.
As reported by the New York Times, clippings of hair—originally collected for display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and held in the collection of the museum ever since—now count among the holdings to be sent back to their rightful homes under the auspices of the Native American Graves Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Since the hair was identified in the early 1990s by a researcher shortly after NAGPRA’s passing, the federal law required institutions to repatriate Native American remains in their collections. “But for decades, some museums interpreted the law as excluding hair”—as opposed to skulls and bones—“even though Native groups and government officials insisted otherwise,” according to the Times.
After Harvard’s Peabody Museum agreed to repatriate hair in 2022, the federal government updated the law to make hair an explicit part of what constitutes remains—“unless an institution can prove they were given freely or naturally shed.” And now the American Museum of Natural History has updated its repatriation plans to include 2,700 hair samples, in the wake of renovating its Northwest Coast Hall with tribal consultation and a pledge to revise two halls focused on Native American cultures.
Museum officials have reached out to some 150 tribes associated with the samples of hair—including the Choctaw, Cree, Sioux, Chippewa, Crow, Menomini, Munsee, Omaha, and Oneida—and also asked Congress to increase funding for NAGPRA-affiliated programs.
“As the work to accelerate compliance with NAGPRA around the country has gained an elevated importance at the Department of Interior,” museum president Sean M. Decatur told the Times, “the investment in resources to make this work possible nationally hasn’t kept pace.”
