Why Native remains are treated like collector’s items — High Country News
▻https://www.hcn.org/articles/indian-country-news-why-native-remains-are-treated-like-collectors-items
The consequences are damaging, beyond the obvious disrespect. Possession and display of remains are a reminder of a painful history. That’s because exploitation of remains played an integral role in the justification for the slaughter and pillaging of Manifest Destiny. In the 1830s and 1840s, the man known as the father of American physical anthropology, #Samuel_Morton, used Indigenous remains gathered from “collectors” to evaluate cranium capacity and make suppositions about intelligence.
In his 1839 book, Crania Americana, Morton concluded that Native Americans were “adverse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge” and were thus inferior to Europeans. “For white settlers living to the West, this was exactly what they wanted to hear,” the University of Cambridge reported. “Crania Americana was published just as the remaining Shawnee peoples of Ohio were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River.” Not long after, in 1867, a Surgeon General order directed Army personnel to find and collect skulls and other body parts of Native Americans for the Army Medical Museum. The intent was to essentially copy Morton’s method and make similar anthropological conclusions.
“These theories provided ‘scientific support’ for the Manifest Destiny policies followed by the United States during the 19th century — policies that led to the relocation of Indian tribes and taking of tribal lands, and the aggressive policies that decimated tribal populations and suppressed tribal cultures and religions.” Jack Trope, the former director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, wrote in a book on the subject.
#déshumanisation #racisme #histoire #états-unis #peuples_autochtones