Racism, ‘Morbid Curiosity’ Drove US Museums to Collect Indigenous Remains
WASHINGTON — In December 1900, John Wesley Powell received “the most unusual Christmas present of any person in the United States, if not in the world,” reported the Chicago Tribune. The gift for this first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology was a sealskin sack containing the mummified remains of an Alaska Native. The […]
