Our Roundtable, “Ceding Disciplinary Control: Anthropological Praxis and Descendant Community Organizing for the Return of Ancestral Remains at the Penn Museum,” is scheduled for Friday, November 22, at 12:45pm-2:15pm, at the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting.
UPDATE: We will be sharing a video and the handout from the roundtable soon–thanks to all who attended! We still have some expenses we need to cover and contributions are greatly appreciated.
Other ways to contribute funds
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
FUNDRAISING GOAL
As of November 24, we still need to raise an additional $755 to be able to cover the costs of the presenters on this panel who do not regularly attend this conference for professional reasons. These costs include expenses such as registration, flights, hotel, and membership fees.
Thank you to all who have contributed thus far! As of November 24, we have raised $2,940.
Please contribute if you can, and share this page widely.
It’s important that descendant community members who have been harmed by anthropologists past and present are not asked to pay for the privilege of sharing at AAAs.
It’s also extremely important that our voices be heard at the main conference within the field of Anthropology, particularly given this year’s conference theme of “Praxis.”
Learn more about Finding Ceremony’s work in the article Co-Conveners aAliy A. Muhammad and Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro wrote for SAPIENS in May 2023: “Finding Ceremony for Ancestors Held in the Penn Museum and Other Colonial Institutions”
More information about our session: “Ceding Disciplinary Control: Anthropological Praxis and Descendant Community Organizing for the Return of Ancestral Remains at the Penn Museum”:
ABSTRACT
The growing expectation that stolen ancestors in museums be returned to descendants was signaled powerfully by the Department of the Interior’s recent changes to close loopholes around “culturally unaffiliated” Native American human remains and cultural belongings under NAGPRA. While this trend is encouraging, it is important to consider that anthropological praxis within a decolonial context must also recognize when anthropologists should cede decision making to descendant community members (La Roche and Blakey 1997). The issues here are absolutely the responsibility of anthropologists; but are anthropologists always the best ones to address them? Human remains collections are the foundation of the discipline of anthropology, whose origin has been dated to the creation of the “Morton Cranial Collection” (Hrdlička 1914). Now held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum), the 1,300+ ancestral crania in this collection were stolen primarily in the mid-19th century by and for Philadelphia scholar Dr. Samuel George Morton to support his theory that Blumenbach’s five races were separate species on the basis of measurable cranial capacity. This roundtable will discuss developments in the five years since West Philadelphia writer and organizer aAliy Muhammad made the first public demand for the return of enslaved ancestors in the Morton Collection, igniting a movement that also brought to light the Penn Museum’s possession of the remains of children murdered in the MOVE bombing. From this has emerged “Finding Ceremony,” a descendant-led process for the return of ancestral remains (Muhammad and Monteiro 2023). Although some have supported decolonial community attempts to address these connected injustices, many anthropologists have chosen to actively obstruct, ignore, silence, and respond with police action against those seeking the return of family members. Ongoing concerns include: MOVE remains yet to be accounted for (only 3 bone fragments were returned to family in 2021, whereas more than a dozen are visible in the museum’s photographs from 2014); the museum’s January 2024 transfer of 19 crania to cemetery vaults, ignoring the research and requests of the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group; and the continued possession of Morton’s collection of crania. The conspicuous attrition of Penn Museum and UPenn anthropologists from this ongoing work suggests the limits of anthropological praxis, particularly for those embedded within the very colonial structures that continue to cause harm to ancestors.
In support of this year’s conference theme of “Praxis,” this roundtable convenes panelists who hold multiple identities and commitments in connection with this work: organizers, anthropologists, museum workers, public historians, Black Philadelphians, and members of other descendant communities represented in Morton’s global collection.
PARTICIPANTS
Discussant: Dr. Kathleen Fine-Dare, author of Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. She is professor emeritus of Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies at Fort Lewis College. Kathy was faculty affiliate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, and served until 2021 as FLC’s NAGPRA compliance officer. She continues active NAGPRA scholarship as well as collaborative research with an Indigenous community in Quito, Ecuador.
Panelists: aAliy A. Muhammad, Co-Convener of Finding Ceremony, is a poz writer born/raised in Philadelphia. In 2019, they were the first to publicly call for the return of ancestors in the Morton Cranial Collection; and in 2021, they broke the news that Penn Museum held the remains of victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing. In their work they often problematize medical surveillance, discuss the importance of bodily autonomy and center Blackness.
Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro, Co-Convener of Finding Ceremony, is an artist, organizer, and multidisciplinary scholar, trained in anthropological archaeology and history, whose work focuses on the uses of the past in public culture, with a particular emphasis on issues of race, representation, and trauma in the telling of the United States’ pasts. She is currently writing a book titled UnCollect Our Ancestors: Finding Ceremony & the descendant community struggle for the return of the Penn Museum’s Morton Cranial Collection (under advance contract with Penn Press).
Jazmin Benton is a Philadelphia-based museum professional. She is a member of the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group as well as Finding Ceremony’s archival research team.
Lauren Nofi is an archaeologist and teacher, as well as a museum educator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. She is a member of Finding Ceremony’s genealogy research team.
Other ways to contribute funds
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
ABOUT FINDING CEREMONY
Finding Ceremony is a descendant community-controlled reparationist process, restoring the lineages of care, reverence and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead. The formation of Finding Ceremony stems from aAliy Muhammad’s and Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s observation and study of the Penn Museum’s negligence stretching back decades, not only with the Morton Cranial Collection, but also with regard to the MOVE remains, and the other estimated 12,000 individuals held in the basement of the museum to this day.
CORE PRINCIPLES
1. The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania have no decision-making role in the process of return of the ancestors–as the perpetrators of the harm, they cannot be part of the healing (other than through funding this work).
2. There are no easy or ideal or even very good solutions to the question of how to return the ancestors in the Morton Collection; and this is because we live in the world that empire has made (with the help of Morton’s racial science)–a world that has intentionally severed the ties to family and homelands of both the living and the dead. While it may be possible to identify direct, lineal descendants for some of the people whose skulls were stolen and trafficked across the world, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do that for everyone.
3. Given the absence of good solutions, Finding Ceremony proposes that a group of people who are deeply concerned about afterlives of ancestors serve as a stewardship body, who can care for the ancestors who have been held at the Penn Museum, until the best group of people gather to decide what to do with any part of the Morton Collection that they recognize to be their ancestors.
Other ways to contribute funds
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Finding Ceremony 