 All right, why don't I go ahead and get us started? I'm sure more people will be longing on as over the next couple of minutes. So I'm Bob Trug. I'm director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. And this seminar is in honor of Black History Month. And it's been organized as part of a collaboration between the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the National Center for Bioethics and Research and Healthcare at Tuskegee University. So this is the third year that we have together sponsored a series of seminars during Black History Month. And if you're interested, all of the previous seminars are available on our website, some of which have had several thousand views. So they've been popular. This year, we are cosponsoring two seminars. This one this evening looks at the question of how we respect the human remains of those who were enslaved and involves reflections on the report of the Harvard Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections. Do you want to advance to the next slide? Great. So I want to call your attention to the session next week, which will be on Friday, February 17, from 12.30 to 2. And will be done as part of our standing series on research ethics. And this session will be led by Dr. Lachlan Faro. It's entitled Tuskegee Healing, the Moral Determinants of Health, and the Ethics of Research on Black Health. I strongly encourage you to register through our website. Dr. Faro has engaged a fascinating panel of speakers who will explore key but often underappreciated aspects of the United States Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male. So again, please go to our website to register for this session on February 17. Next slide, Julie. All right. So I want to just go through just a little bit of the logistics here for you. So as I know all of you are familiar, you have the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. So what you put in the Q&A box can only be seen by the panelists. And this will be the box that we're primarily monitoring. And during our discussion section, we'll be looking at your comments and answering your questions. You also know that you have the chat feature down there. What's put in the chat box can be seen by everyone. And especially if you have any technical difficulties, please use that. Julie Alouche, our amazing and wonderfully talented administrative lead here, will be monitoring that box and will help you out with any technical issues. But also it can be a place for any comments that you want to direct to the audience in general. And then finally, I would just refer to you our website. We've got lots of programming going on. Think about most of it, if not all of it, very, very good. And so I hope you'll check us out there. Maybe why don't we go, Julie? I guess we can, yeah, why don't we stay here for a second? That sounds good. I want to give a little bit of an introduction to the session that we're doing this evening. So first of all, in a moment, you'll be hearing from Professor Evelyn Hammons, the Barbara Gutman-Rosenkranz, Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Let me give you just a little bit of background here. As Professor Hammons will describe in a moment in more detail, the topic of this seminar emerged from the Presidential Initiative on Harvard University and the Legacy of Slavery. Now this launched toward the end of 2019. And as part of that initiative, we learned that the Peabody Museum has holdings that include the remains of 15 individuals who were likely to have been enslaved. So in January of 2021, Harvard President Bacow established the Steering Committee on Human Remains under the leadership of Professor Evelyn Hammons as the Chair. The findings and the recommendations of the report will be the subject of this evening's seminar. So we'll do the next slide. All right. So joining us for the discussion are several members of the committee. To introduce them briefly, we have Professor Philip DeLoria. He's the Leverett Salt and Stahl Professor of History at Harvard. Also, Scott Podolsky, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine. We also have Jane Pickering, the William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and Dominic Hall, the Curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School. All right. So let's begin by having Professor Hammons lead us through a brief summary of the report, its finding and recommendations and then we'll ask our panelists to reflect on the report and the many questions and issues that it raises and also respond to the questions and comments that you will pose in the Q&A box. So Evelyn, we'll turn to your slides. Thanks, Bob. And I just wanted to say it's, I'm really happy that we're having this conversation in Black History Month because I think it has opened up a new set of questions that will I think gain greater visibility and interest over time. So the university steering committee on human remains. Next slide, please. So Bob just walked through this timeline that really shows where and why we began some of this work. 2019, the launch of the Presidential Initiative on Harvard University and the Legacy Slavery and then the research that was done by the Peabody Museum which identified the remains of 15 individuals of African descent who were or were likely to have been alive during the period of slavery. Following that, in January of 2021, President Bacow announced this finding to the university community and brought to the attention also the presence of 22,000 other individuals in Harvard's museum collections. He charged the university steering committee on human remains. So we began in January, 2021. And then also at that time, the Peabody director, Jane Pickering, made one of our specifics and formal apologies for the practices that led to the Peabody's large collection of Native American human remains and funerary belongings. Next slide. So what do we mean by human remains? So human remains comprise the bodies or parts of bodies of once living peoples. In museums, most human remains are from archeological excavations. Think of Egyptian mummies, Aztecs peoples. Both a complete skeleton of an individual and a bone fragment, for example, will be considered human remains. But we also think of these remains as an individual. The Peabody right now cares for human remains from about 17,000 individuals, which principally comprise fragmentary remains from archeological contexts. Approximately 650 individuals are not from an archeological context, many with no geographical information and they were transferred to the Peabody from other parts of the university. We also have the Warn anatomical collection which cares for a historical collection of 3,200 skeletal, 900 fluid preserved and 200 anatomically prepared human remains. Most of these remains have Massachusetts origins and often come from private or hospital-based clinical care environments and the remains are mostly anatomical components or represent a specific diseased area and with few exceptions are not whole bodies. So, but the report covers human remains found in the university museums. It does not include tissue, DNA, or other samples in our affiliated hospitals or research laboratories or human remains acquired as part of the Harvard Medical School Anatomical GIF program. Next slide. So, the charge was to undertake archival research on the remains of the 15 individuals identified in the Peabody review and consider options for the return of these remains as well as their burial or reburial commemoration and memorialization. So, these efforts serve as a way, as a kind of pilot to inform the rest of our charge which is the creation of a comprehensive survey of human remains present across all university museum collections as well as their use in current teaching and research. The development of a university-wide policy on the collection display an ethical stewardship of human remains in the university museum collections and the proposal of principles and practices that address research, community consultation, memorialization, possible repatriation, burial or reburial and other care considerations. And I just wanna point out here that these efforts have, this is the first time the university has turned its attention to our sort of, our stewardship of these remains in such a comprehensive way. And I think this is my personal opinion is that this is a major step for the university since our holdings and since the individuals that we have in our care are so numerous. This is an important step to begin to take care of them. Next slide. Excuse me. There were 15 initial individuals identified now, 19. We had identified, the PBD, I should say, have identified four additional individuals, two from the Caribbean and two from Brazil who again were likely to have been enslaved. We have a wonderful bioarchaeologist from our Inequality in America program which is a post-doctoral fellow, Asia Lands, and she's really begun the Providence research on the 15 individuals and making some progress. She's locating names, death certificates, location and plot numbers of tombs, findings that begin to restore the personal histories of these individuals and open the way for respectful community engagement, memorialization and return and reburial. She has discovered that two of these individuals from the US in fact were born after 1865 and we have some summaries of our current research in the report. Next slide. So our recommendation one really speaks to the enslaved or those who are likely to have been enslaved individuals. Treating these individuals with care and dignity means first treating them for first and foremost as individuals. This group of remains represents a diversity of geography, temporal context, cultural beliefs and perhaps even funerary rights. So understanding them as individuals is a complex undertaking that's gonna require time, respect and sensitivity. But the first step is really doing a careful provenance research to recover to whatever extent possible the history of each individual and to identify communities and millennial descendants with whom decisions regarding internment or return or repatriation should be made. And I should also indicate here that provenance research is not an easy research enterprise. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of attention and we are going to put in that time and attention as we go about trying to understand the provenance of these individuals. So the recommendation for the individuals who have been identified as being a slave or likely to have been enslaved at the time they were brought into our collections the university will employ this provenance research and then began appropriate consultation with communities or millennial descendants. And the goal being to implement internment, re-interment, return to those communities or repatriation of remains. Another recommendation is for the individuals who have been identified. So recommendation two is returning human remains in Harvard collections. We have established a human remains returns committee and appropriate supporting administration to oversee and implement returns outside of NAGPRA, which is the Native American project. This committee will exist as long as it is needed in order to complete its work and will be situated in the provost's office. And that's already been established. Another recommendation is to continue. I think I want to go back one slide for a sec. To continue investigation of the acquisition and presence of remains in the museums and further commit to repatriating and re-interring or returning those remains. And also the university will continue and accelerate its implementation of NAGPRA legislation and the ethical and moral imperative it represents. Since NAGPRA mandates a certain progress that may not be available in other situations, we want this to be overseen by the Peabody Museum and its NAGPRA advisory committee. And you'll hear more about that in a bit. Next recommendation, ethical care. So we've advised the university to construct a purpose design on campus space to support respectful treatment of human skeletal remains following within the scope of these recommendations, including areas for consultation, research and teaching. We want a space that's gonna foster reflective and thoughtful consideration with private restorative areas as well as the space for community consultation visits, including appropriate storage and research facilities and classroom spaces that promote respectful scholarship and learning. And so we've already begun to investigate spaces around the Faculty of Arts and Sciences buildings that would be possible sites for consideration for such a space. So next recommendation, research and teaching. We have already, as I said, established the Human Remains Research Review Committee to work with museum staff on assessing requests to use certain human remains for research by Harvard and external scholars. This committee will be housed in the provost's office and we'll review these requests on a case-by-case basis. We're gonna have also made a recommendation for teaching purposes. And in lieu of using human remains, we really encourage faculty to make use of new technologies, high-quality replicas, anatomical models or skeletal elements from sources that involve donor consent whenever possible. And we are suggesting that historical collection should only be used for specific classes that actually require them. That would be one example, could be a class that's looking at a disease that has deep historical roots and it might be important to show some actual remains in that case. That's gonna be a question that will be asked before such as allowed for teaching. We also wanna maintain that they use for teaching, they must be treated with dignity and respect. And we're also encouraging the faculty to think about how they might use these remains and encourage in teaching and developing new curricula and how they are actually the ways on which they're connected to the university's history. Recommendation five, please. We are actually recommending that the Returns Committee should also include members who have meaningful experience and expertise to engage descendant communities and engage them in our decision-making including identification of the proper community partners and culturally appropriate methods for consultation. Excuse me. We're recommending that the university commit to consulting with these appropriate community representatives being transparent in our actions and decisions while considering the rights and wishes of community partners particularly in the case of lineal descendants that have been identified. And so the annual report of the Returns Committee will detail any kind of specific contacts made with communities requesting return or stewardship of remains in any given year. Okay, recommendation six, memorialization. So as the university honors the legacy of slavery in its history through memorialization, we recommend the inclusion of the enslaved or likely enslaved individuals whose remains have been held in Harvard's museum collections. We wanna create a space where those individuals and their lives can be honored in a public way. We also recommend the process of return that the process of return will include the consideration of appropriate memorialization as part of the larger set of efforts that we will be engaged in as part and parcel of the Harvard and Legacy of Slavery projects go forward. Okay, I think... I think that's the room... I know that's a lot, but I think we just wanted to give you a sense of, the major areas of which the report addressed. Well, Professor Hammons, thank you for this and also for your leadership of the committee. I mean, such an important topic for us. I thought before getting into any specific issues, I just wanted to hear from the panelists, all of you were members of this committee. What was your experience of being on the committee? If you're willing to share any particular insights that you experienced from this. I know that in the conversations, many of you had some very moving experiences related to this sort of thing. And if you're willing or able to share some of those reflections, I'm sure people would like to hear them. Okay, Bob, we're not gonna leave you hanging. I promise. I mean, I can just start, I think by saying that I've worked with NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act since 1994, mostly on committees like our steering committee, oversight committees, in several different institutions. And for a lot of years, I've been involved in the sort of nitty gritty of the ethical kinds of decisions here. And one of the things I realized out of the committee was as much as those of us who've been involved in NAGPRA are unhappy with some of the administrative burdens that the law and the regulatory law puts upon us in NAGPRA. There are certain forms of clarity that in, for example, we make returns to federally recognized tribes. And when we, for me in this committee, sort of thinking hard about what a descendant community looked like for these 15 or 19 remains of potentially enslaved individuals, the complications of this really did sort of hit home. To what extent can we imagine locating lineal descendants? There are some folks on the committee who thought that DNA testing would be a kind of really good way into that. This is completely foreign to people working with Native American tribes. Most Native American tribes or many Native American tribes around that. What would it look like to actually find and located a descendant community? For example, one of these individuals can be tied to a particular Richmond, as I recall, or a particular location. Would that mean a descendant community of people who were located in Richmond? Proximate communities, which have that kind of geographical kind of location, or simply a community that's literally constituted out of those who are potentially interested in these kinds of things. So to me, one of the things that really hit home about working on the committee was the both the pragmatic, but also the ethical dimensions of identifying people with whom to be in consultation and just how challenging that is. I agree with everything that Phil just said, but I also think for me, at some point, I just sort of hit a kind of epistemological wall. And I realized I was talking about human remains and thinking about them and thinking about the work of the committee, but I hadn't really experienced, had the experience of actually visiting them. And that visit really transformed my life. And it was really important. It shifted me from maybe partly my administrative head and thinking to my heart and soul, responding to how and why these people were here and what it meant to have them in our care. And the responsibility of those in this period of time to what had been done in the past. And it was really a profound experience. Yeah, and for me, I've worked in museums for many, many years. And it really, we've been thinking at the PVD Museum. I mean, this was part of that, but thinking about what it means, what ethical stewardship, especially in an anthropology museum means. And working with this committee and thinking, particularly when President Bacow made the initial announcement and really thinking about what it means to have thousands of ancestral remains in the museum, what that says about our history, what our ethical and moral responsibilities are, was something that as someone who's really charged to not only think about these issues, but also act, it was very powerful to hear, to have the expertise and sort of thinking of a really incredible group of people that, especially from sort of not just other museum people, though Dominic and I both love other museum people, but just getting that sort of insight from outside our usual sort of bubble. And also the other thing I was thinking when you said what were your reflections, I realized the other thing that I have really come to know and think about and Evelyn's visit was one of those things is that we often think in museums about what we should be doing and how can we do better. But actually the whole, the fact that the whole nature of our institutions where this sort of really visible tangible result of the sort of colonial enterprise and the bringing together bodies and cultural items from sort of, especially in the 19th and early 20th century. And our very nature is exclusionary. There are people and I know Phil knows a colleague of ours who once said native people don't like going in museums. And as a museum person, you always think and people say, well, museums, they're good things, they're educational, blah, blah, blah. And that really, I think the work that we've been doing over the last couple of years and has really made me sort of think about the very sort of fundamental nature of our museum but other museums and what we represent as institutions. Go ahead. I mean, I'm sort of reflective by nature. And so when I think about what actually not even speaking to sort of the larger sort of questions that were being presented within the community but I actually found myself deeply grateful for being appointed by the president of the university and serving with people whose perspectives were different than mine. And in part because there are very few surviving anatomical and pathological collections left in the United States. And it's a super small community. And you're faced, these are a lot of these questions that we're asking in these meetings or on the committee or continue to ask and we'll probably ask for, I don't know, decades. You ask yourself, like when you're by yourself, you know, doing your day-to-day job, it wasn't that we weren't, I wasn't asking myself some of these questions. And so the fact that the president elevated this and brought a group of people together who were essentially all much more thoughtful than I was and that I could benefit from, it was just an incredible, like it was just deeply personal to me. It was like, oh wow, like we can have a conversation about this and it's not literally me and it's not just me and Scott in his office. And so that was, it's an odd feeling to have because the work is very heavy, but it isn't like a deep appreciation and being really grateful for the fact that we've started this journey. I also will say that there's this thing that Evelyn said, I bring me at the end, or Professor Hammond said towards the end of our meetings but this was the end of the beginning. And, you know, I find that sort of continually echoes in whenever I start to think deeply about what our next steps are. And Tom always says it better than I would. So I felt the same way. I mean, certainly he and I have been, the first I like, Bob I went to medical school, I went to HMS where this was the part of the medical education and to actually put this historical moral lens on these collections and how they came here and the complexities of these collections is what we should be doing. Certainly as a center for the history of medicine, it's what we should be doing. This was such an opportunity to learn from really thoughtful colleagues and multiple perspectives on the histories of these collections and the sense of structural violence shapes these collections to some extent. And as we think through where we should be moving from here and this will be a many year activity. So grateful to be in this with such thoughtful colleagues and then can I get to not just be thinking this through along with the ex-officio on these committees moving forward as we think through this, just enormously grateful. And it's really been my opening. Let me turn to our audience. So Jala Jafari asks, are there any precedents of other organizations doing similar work? And if so, what did they do well and what can we seek to replicate and what was not executed well? And I kind of want to use that question as a little bit of a segue because Jane and Phil, both of you have deep experience with NAGPRA. And first of all, I'm not sure that everyone listening knows about NAGPRA. And so I wondered if you'd say a little bit about that and then how what we're doing now is both similar and different. I mean, one, I might be wrong about this, so please correct me, but I mean, Native American remains are often connected with particular tribes. And so there's sort of an obvious place to look. But for people who were enslaved African Americans, it's kind of not so obvious who you turn to when you want to know where these remains should be repatriated. So first of all, a little bit about NAGPRA, what were the lessons you learned from that? And then what are the ways that it connects to this project? Well, I can start and Jane, you can correct me when I get things wrong. So NAGPRA was a piece of legislation passed in 1990, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It was in many ways sort of angular attached to the formation of the National Museum of the American Indian. The Smithsonian collections, collections that are in the Smithsonian system of human remains actually fall under the NMAI Enabling Act rather than under NAGPRA. And what it did in brief was it laid out four categories of things that could be considered for repatriation to this position. So human remains, funerary objects, which could be associated or unassociated, objects of cultural patrimony and sacred objects that were important to the sort of ongoing spiritual practice of Native peoples. So within those categories, then museums and other institutions were mandated and charged with preparing inventories, taking those inventories and reaching out to tribes and tribal entities with those inventories and then consulting with tribes about objects and remains that may or may not be, have been able to be affiliated with those tribes. And so the goal was to affiliate or associate remains and other kinds of museum objects with tribal people. And then that would set up a process where repatriation would go forward. The tribe actually puts in a petition to the museum. The museum, curiously, interesting is the judge of that. There's a NAGPRA review process, but the museum is actually the first arbiter of these things. And what emerged in the first decade or so was the difficulties of making these kinds of affiliations. And so in many institutions, what you got was a category of the culturally unaffiliated. And many, many, many human remains fell into that category. So while it's true that a lot of human remains could be repatriated directly to a tribe, there are a lot that couldn't. In 2010, the regulations that are sort of governing this were revised and a new process was set up and it addresses a question that Amanda Garfunkel, I'm looking at the questions about remains that don't have clear provenance. And it allowed tribes that had a geographical or historical kinds of connections to put in claims. It allowed eventually, there's a sort of a register or a hierarchy kind of thing that a tribe that basically had no connection was also a possible recipient of a disposition under these new regulations for culturally unidentified remains. And one of the things that we did at the National Museum in the American Indian where I was a trustee for 12 years and chaired the repatriation committee for many years was we actually worked with a couple of tribes who were willing to accept remains that just had no provenance at all. And we were able to then move through the collections and make dispositions and return those things to the earth and to a reburial situation. This is where it's different, right? I mean, 574 now federally recognized tribes which are the entities with which we work with NAGPRA. And that's quite different from, as I was saying before the sort of constitution of a potentially descendant kind of community. But I do think the lessons to be learned are many particularly around the ethics of just thinking about human remains, the process and procedures of it all. There's a lot of lessons I think that NAGPRA has given us over those years. So that's my quick summary. Hopefully that's helpful. Jane, anything to add? Yeah, I mean, Phil always does the best summary. But I think we're, so the Peabody cares still for close to 6,000 individuals that we're working to, well, return it's the language. That's one of the things that you learn with NAGPRA is language can get complicated but to return to tribal nation. And I think when I think about NAGPRA the having tribal nations and communities to work with is as Phil already said, the sort of fundamental difference or a difference put it that way in terms of the practicalities of knowing who to speak with because the law essentially tells you. But I think where I really see where NAGPRA I think can help in form moving forward with other remains is through what people have learned and I'm sure Phil would agree, what we've learned from tribes about treatment, about what matters to them in addition to the sort of obviously reburial but how remains need to be treated in the museum. And so with Evelyn coming, we are very, and I know Dominic the Warren is the same, we care for ancestral remains and we talk to tribes. And that came about, I think largely through NAGPRA about how do you care as best as you can given that you know the harm has been caused. The people's remains are in a museum, not in the ground or somewhere else, but how can you make the bet? What can you do to help ameliorate things? Do you can talk to communities? Issues around, I'm sure we'll get to this at some point, issues around testing, you can talk to communities and learn. And I think some of those lessons that we learned about care, about respect, that we as museums learn from tribal nations and conversations and their generosity, I think really applies, can be applied, not one to one because communities have different wants and needs but certainly can help inform the treatment how we care for all the people in the collections. And I just wanted to add that in terms of other organizations, we know that the Smithsonian just released, I guess it was only a few weeks ago, Jane, their new set of policy, well, not that it introduced the policies, but what their next steps will be in terms of how they come to terms with the, I would say many thousands in the Smithsonian remains and they will also establish a review committee, a returns committee and do some similar kinds of things that our report recommended. And I'm also right now sitting in Arbor, Michigan and as soon as we're done, go to the dinner before a meeting tomorrow where there are other universities who have come together, various folks to talk about, continue to talk about these issues and how they are shaped by different histories, geographical context and cultural context as well. Evelyn, specifically, do you think there are things that make this categorically different though from Niagara? Is there new ground that you need to sort of think through here in doing this that is kind of like, it's just different from Niagara because of the different context? I don't think I would say it's just the different context. I would say they are because of the different history. And I think the history and the specificities of those different histories is really important. And of course, the histories and the context that brought us to the kind of legislation that Niagara represents and what you can, and the practices that follow from it, certainly intersect with what we are beginning to think about now for those who were enslaved at the time of their deaths. And so, and of course, Native American history and African American history are not widely separate. There are many points of intersection, both historically and ethically and morally and a whole host of areas. But I found that the deep experience that people like Phillip had with, and Jane as well with dealing with Niagara is really, really compelling and raises, I don't think the issues that we're gonna confront in terms of the formerly enslaved are gonna be, I guess what I wanna say is, we don't have to start from square one. We know we have to come to terms with issues with descended communities. In this case, we don't have official tribes, but what constitutes a descended community for enslaved African Americans, for those who were enslaved? How are we gonna come to terms with that? What's the role of the universities in determining that category? And because the universities who have histories that they will have to confront that, I kinda have to figure that out. And there's not gonna be one answer, I think. I think it's gonna, over time, we're gonna figure, we're gonna be able to come to some terms about that. But I don't think we're there yet by any means. I don't think they'll be hosted, Michigan will be hosting this meeting tomorrow if everybody understood what that was. Everybody does not. Yeah. I mean, it seems like there's this fundamental question of who speaks for these people. And I guess you don't want it to be university committees. And yet, I mean, it's not clear and it's gonna be questions that are gonna have to be answered. One of the participants asked, do you encounter lineal descendants who feel uncomfortable being contacted or presented with decisions? How are they approached? And then what happens with the remains? I think we have yet to really confront that situation here. You know, with NAGPRO, there are I think a few occasions where you can identify lineal descendants. And it is the case that sometimes lineal descendants are taken aback by this. And it is one of the things I think that comes about when we think about what it would look like to identify a genealogically based descended community, right? What we would be doing would be to be constituting a community of people who maybe don't know each other at all, quite likely over time, and bringing them together around what one single thing that they share in common, that they have an ancestor that we're... And so there's some people who, you know, you can easily imagine embracing that and many, many other people that you can imagine not wanting to have anything to do with that, right? So you have, it's one thing to say like, oh, we could figure out what this community looks like. Does that community actually want to be formed, right? And who are we to sort of take on the responsibility for doing that? And what are the consequences of that that we can't actually even foresee, you know? And so when it's maybe easy to think like, oh, ethically we will constitute a descended community, but like it's not even that simple, right? You know, even to name it like that. But also we have some remains that we have the provenance for and we already have one case in particular where, you know, the family is, one person in the family came and took a look at those remains and are, you know, really still trying to figure out how to present that to the family and how the family would in fact, who in the family really wants to know and for whom and for what purpose? And it's incredibly complicated and emotional. So, you know, we will obviously have to be working with both individuals and families. I don't foresee that being an uncomplicated process at all. Well, that kind of leads to a rather provocative question from one in the audience, but I think one that needs to be asked and is probably thought by a number. But the panel speak to what they see as the values or ethical commitments that demand this high level of care and attention that these human remains are receiving. In the most simplistic terms, why do all of this? Who is the intended beneficiary, if any, of these actions or is there another kind of good that is being sought? I don't want to always be the one to jump in. So, and Dom and Scott, you know, they're so great on the committee. But I would say, I mean, the last line that the question is phrased, is there another kind of good being sought versus direct benefit? And, you know, that kind of, I think that puts a slightly different spin on the question, right? Is it a sort of cost-benefit sort of calculation in which there's something that's palpably visible? And I think the answer to that is not so much, right? But I think there is something about like an institution as the possessors of human remains that are part of its own legacy and its own history. That's an unresolved kind of thing. And I think, I mean, I wrote a little thing that shows up in the report where I said something like, you know, look, we're not responsible for this, but we are responsible to it. And I think we do have responsibility to our own history. So in some ways, the reason we do this is for us as an institution, you know, to sort of make amends and make repairs. And I think it is also, you know, sort of we're thinking about the ways that like, these things are not all the same. Some of the racial science collecting, this comes from both the medical side and the sort of ethnographic, ethnology, archeological side, you know? I mean, for native folks, this is like military officers going out after battles and chopping people's heads off, you know, and sending them back to Washington and Philadelphia. And if we think that we're not responsible to that, I think that's a problem. But having said that, I think it's also important to note the ways that like most of the collections in the Peabody are archeological collections that have elements of that racial science, but they're not actually that. They're not that 19th century sort of practice. They're a different kind of thing. And I think the sort of anatomical kinds of dimensions and I will let my med school colleagues speak more to this, you know, having a similar kind of thing, right? There's a racial science of the mid 19th century that's not the same thing as later in different kinds of collecting practices. And so it is worth us thinking a bit about what our obligations are in those different historical kinds of moments. I agree. It just raises one of the many complexities here is what moral status do we give to the debt? And who's moral status do we assign to that? And it's one of the many complexities here about what's the nature of the individual human remaining that we're discussing from a skull to a bladder stone and how and why, from where it was such an individual remain brought into the collection in the first place. What was the agency of the individual for which it was derived in relation to particular, human remain coming here, not understanding that legality at the time does not equate to ethical considerations today. That's what intellectual or social uses has remained to put. And what have been the impacts including possible further propagation of structural violence of such uses. And how might such an individual remain to use today? And again, as we've already said, who speaks for that individual in the first place? And we wrestle with all these questions for any given remain, but a question that the person posed is thoughtful of who is assigning the moral status to these remains in the first place. And like Phyllis said, I think the university, and so there's another question asking why does Harvard do this? Why not have somebody else do this? And I think Harvard has taken responsibility for this history and is going to engage with these difficult questions. And they're not going to be easy moving forward. Maybe turn to a slightly different question. So part of doing this work well is to get as much information as you can about who the person was, where they came from, how they ended up being where they are and all of that. And so some of that requires looking in more detail with the remains themselves, which can itself be controversial. What is the role, for example, of doing genetic sequencing on the remains as a means of getting more information? I mean, in a sense to do a better job of what you're trying to do. But what are the limits of that? Is that always a good thing? Are there problems with that? Well, I think the part that strikes me first is to get more information. So it suggests to me a kind of sense that despite our continuing emphasizing that these were people, these individuals, the sense that they still occupy some liminal space as objects to be studied, that we're going to find out something else, what I don't know, why it would be important, I don't know. But those kind of questions linger over any kind of project like this. And I think that sort of impetus to continue to use these individuals for the production of a particular kind of scientific knowledge that's going to serve who, when, why. It's still a troubling question for me. So I'm unsettled on, well, I guess I'm partially unsettled. I think some of our pieces of our collection that are of the oldest and those who are formerly enslaved in particular, I am not convinced that there's more information to be found that is going to be useful information. I'm happy to engage in that conversation, but I'm not at this point convinced. And I think the other part is a good friend of mine just wrote a recent article about the questions that are coming up at the American Museum of Natural History as they begin some renovations. And the way she focused her comments was to say, who's in these dioramas and these representations of different cultures? They're not typically white Europeans and their culture. It's black and brown peoples and native peoples from around the world. So who's not being studied? So again, so the representations are not of the entire diversity of the world, but it's really about certain peoples. And to me that leads to really, I think troubling question about how much more research is necessary and for what purposes. And I would not going to be comfortable until I hear arguments that I feel to be convincing that there's actually more to be done and more to be understood than what we already know. Or that could be understood and known in different ways than continuing to use these individuals as research objects. Yeah, if I may segue off of Evelyn, I mean, one of the things that happens when you do that research is you create new knowledge that you then have to store, curate and steward and possibly protect. And so you really have to ask yourself that hard question is what is the purpose of generating this new information which theoretically could exist at a place like Harvard Medical School or the university forever. And so it's not an easy decision when you think about generating that knowledge. I will say that we, so at the Warren, when people are asking us health questions about pathology specimens in our collection, like we're still thinking about the bench science utility of these historic human remains that the ones that came out of clinical environments not necessarily, we're not asking ourselves those questions about the ones that were collected racially. Those are pretty, it's pretty clear that those are the individuals that were referring to something like the newly formed returns communities just to find a way home. But we are asking ourselves this question, like what, and I think it's an important one, like is the knowledge worth it is such a hard way to say it because it's a utilitarian argument and then I get uncomfortable. But with these health collections, we are asking ourselves those questions. And I do not worry is not the right word, but you have to steward the data just like almost like you would steward the remains. And so you have to think very carefully before you create it because it's always that first decision. In a lot of ways we were here because some people made some really poor first decisions. And so when you don't want to necessarily repeat them. So one of our participants asks, in the process of discussing the return of remains or materials with the descendants or descendant communities, does Harvard sometimes request permission to keep the materials for teaching or research? I was going to extend that just a little bit is might we imagine that some people might have wanted to advance science or those sorts of things? Would this information actually be useful to a community to know that they'd contributed to scientific advancement? Obviously with the complexities of the racialization of these things that were present in the last century. Complicated question, I don't know. Well, how do you reflect on that question when we're talking about the historical collections because now of course people can leave their bodies for explicitly for research, but they give their permission. So I guess I'm wondering is when you now come to a descendant of that person. Now, obviously they don't know what that person's preferences were, but could they say, I don't see anything disrespectful about learning from one of my ancestors. I could take that as a hypothetical, if that's okay. Yeah, help me out here. That's obviously- No, because it comes up. There are actually individuals in the War Museum collection that have nothing, we would never call it consent. It's like a consent narrative in some sense, like someone's parent. Actually the most famous case in the museum is Phineas Gage, his mother donated his remains. And so there are descendants, not a Phineas Gage because he didn't have children, but descendants of Gage's family who know he's here. And again, he's not a great case to talk about this because it's a very public case. He's a highly celebrated case in the history of neuroanatomy. Just say a word about that, Dominic. Not everyone may know the- Oh yeah, I don't want to blame her too much, but he had a transcranial brain injury that altered his personality in 1848 in Cavendish, Vermont. It's a well-used case study and his skull is in the War Museum. But so there is that, I would call, it is an exception because usually those individuals we might know their names from their hospital records, but they're not published names. And so that could exist. But the hypothetical I was gonna refer to is that if someone, I think we, I don't know where we would end up, but if someone, a family member, wanted to then sort of, I don't know, not re-donate, but I think we would entertain the idea that if, you know, because then you would sort of like, you would have a much more ethically strong case to use those remains if you contacted descendant family members, again, not with any of the stuff that we're actually really talking about. We might consider then doing further work because they would be, in a sense, given this new set of ethics. It would be interesting. Some institutions do do that. I've never faced that before, but it is an interesting thought. But again, then we're talking about a whole different consent relationship that we are not talking about with formerly enslaved individuals or disinterred Native Americans. That's not the issue there. Yeah. But it is interesting that it really did not come up in our deliberations to this point. It's a very interesting question. I mean, for, as we extend more broadly beyond the remains of the enslaved or Native Americans, we start thinking this through. And we thought of identifying descendant communities so that we could return remains. I don't think we've entertained yet the possibility of asking them would they want the remains to remain here for future utility? It's something for us all to consider. Evelyn, are you gonna say anything? No. I just think it's a hard one. You know, I mean, again, I think it would have to get really much more deeper into what that knowledge is, what it's really about and put it in a kind of some context where we could make some, I hate to say it this way, value judgment about it. It's hard to think about to me, for me anyway, in totally abstract terms. So we can just think that there's something called, pure research or pure utility or any of that. I don't think any of these things are pure. They're all pretty impure actually. But so it's kind of hard, but I think as other institutions get involved in these conversations and discussions, we're all gonna be struggling with how to make those determinations at this point. And there are different ways people value particular kinds of knowledge. And if we're gonna be as an institution, as a research one institution, as we call ourselves, how are we gonna come to terms with people who do not prize research as the ultimate and most important and significant goal that maybe something that's very, very different that is simply moralization or might mean much, much more to folks then, to some folks then than researchers. So another question from or a comment from Jala Jafari, I would follow up on here, maybe for you Phil, because you made this distinction between responsible to rather than responsible for, I mean, I'm not sure this was exactly what the question was intended, but is there a way that Harvard is actually responsible for and that that imposes some additional obligations upon, I'll say us as part of that university? Well, yeah, right. I mean, it's a distinction I made that may not have as much of a distinction as one might imagine, right? I mean, so much of the context, I mean, when you go into the Peabody collections and Jane, you can sort of jump in here, but it's very uneven. Some of this is Harvard-sponsored archeological expeditions that feels responsible for. Other stuff is collections of some museum that went defunct and it sort of kicked around and then before you know it, like we're a funnel institution, things get funneled in here and all of a sudden we are responsible to and for all kinds of things that the institution itself actually had nothing to do with essentially, but we're still responsible to it as in a larger kind of structural context, I think. And maybe that is a point of sort of thinking like, well, and actually there's some things that we were responsible for that we were completely involved in. I mean, in the early days of the Peabody, all kinds of interesting things were going on, right? Frederick Ward Putnam was out with a P-card buying mounds in Ohio. I mean, it's like, you know, there's stuff in our history that we actually then I think do have to grapple with. Yeah, that's one of the things I think at the Peabody, well, any museum, but especially at a really historical museum like the Peabody is this difference between, and this applies to cultural items as well, that are really there because the museum existed, there wasn't another museum in the area. So things were given to the institution, that's often why university museums became so large, historically, because they were the only sort of stable institution around. And so people would say, oh, I mean, you look at the really old, the Ashmoly Museum or things like that, it was because the university existed. And so, and from Barnum's museum, for example, you know, the Lewis and Clark, we have, there are items from the Lewis and Clark expedition that came because they came through like three or four museums and land up at Harvard. And so, and we have ancestral remains that are a result of that. And then as, so have, and this is where the thousands, I think both of Native American, but also other sort of individuals from around the world, and particularly sort of Meso and South America, where it was research and Harvard did, as Phil says, went out and, you know, with the equivalent of the, you know, ramp money or endowment money or whatever to collect. So I often wonder about those two, in a way the end result is the same, but what is the institutional responsibility and what does it mean to the institution to have those two sort of different routes to where we are today with what we need to do today. It's also, I think the question, you know, is really a good one because it also surfaces for us the sort of sense of the language of caretaker and stewardship, right? Which is a language that we've really adopted as an effort to be ethically responsible to the things which are here. You know, so we wanna be, if we're stewards, we wanna be good stewards, but it does raise the question, you know, at what point can we step away from our stewardship in a responsible way, you know, and return things or move away from those kinds of stewardship. So, you know, we're caught in a sort of sense, right? That until a good mechanism to sort of transcend stewardship and make return and repair until that comes along, we are actually, you know, the functional stewards of material and then having an obligation to be good stewards. And oftentimes that stewardship doesn't look so good, right? To the folks who are sitting outside of this institution. Yeah. And I think a part of our ethical stewardship process has to be self-critical reflection on what we, this university sponsored in the past. Individuals who engaged in quote unquote, research that justified some heinous acts, but they were not seen as heinous at the time, but maybe just, this is what you do when you go out and collect other people. But as a university, we have this, it was sponsored. Nobody got fired for going out and robbing, you know, graves or bringing these individuals here without their consent. So what does that impose upon the university and our varied notion of the production of knowledge? So we should be examining that. We're in the 21st century. We should be consciously intentionally, deliberately, carefully critical of our past practices in order to figure out how we go forward and how we repair. And what you said, what you said, Phil, about, you know, stepping from stewardship, but you know, I think where we were before, we weren't even at the point of stewardship was not even our goal. It seemed to me it was more storage than stewardship. I hate to say it that way, but there are profound epistemological questions here about the obligations of a university and responsibility it has to research that it supports that actually does harm in the world. So many great questions and comments in the box. I'm not gonna be able to do just this whole one. So forgive me if I've missed important ones, but let me ask this one. And Evelyn, I think you would just talk, you were just reflecting on this a little bit. What kind of impact does this have then on how we are collecting human remains now? Are there different set of ethical principles in place? I mean, I imagine Harvard has got archeological digs going on around the world. They don't, Jane's telling me. Well, no, no, no, I should say that the Peabody no longer collects ancestral remains and hasn't done for several decades at this point. And I should say there are people, archeologists still at the university, but now sort of cultural items, ancestral remains from excavations around the world now stay in the country of origin. So Harvard itself is no longer, the Peabody is no longer adding to the collection. So it doesn't address Evelyn's comments about the production of knowledge, but yes, we're not in that position anymore and haven't been for a while actually. Well, okay, but that's the Peabody. I mean... Right, yeah, so I was just... The Warren, the Warren really hasn't collected human remains except for in a very passive way since the 50s. Really, the Warren itself contracted a great deal after World War II for various reasons. But we still, so there's sort of a broad moratorium on taking any new remains. I don't, I would be hard-pressed to be convinced to do so unless sometimes those remains do still come to us because they were already in another part of the medical school. And so, but these will be for almost the exclusive majority of their microscope slides. And they've been part of someone's work and the Center for the History of Medicine has decided to collect their personal papers. And within that sometimes will come some microscope slides. And they need some form of stewardship. And so, if you could just put those slides in with the papers and pretend, I guess, that they're not human remains. I mean, you could have a whole argument whether they are a guess if like a blood smear is human remains. And I think it's a good debate to have. But we do separate them out and call them human remains. But, you know, you're talking something to the equivalent to like 10 slides a year. It's a very, very small amount. I do think that there's a larger question than not the university that we don't have to necessarily wrestle with if we don't want to. But there are remains out there. And they're not in like not in universities or in museums that are closing. And then those remains like enter into this sort of gray universe. And so when I was thinking about responsibility, I always, you know, and something they get offered to us and we always say no. But I think, but that to me is this question that I kind of wanted to answer too, but like I want society to come up with an answer with it. So that's obviously like, that's obviously impractical. But like these orphaned remains, they have to go somewhere and where are those places they're going to go? Even if it's just an interim step to some sort of internment or return. And you take on a world of responsibility when you do that. So no one that probably wants to. But I think that like societies and somewhat responsible to these remains because they were generated. I'm just thinking medically to create the medical knowledge in some respects that we all enjoy. And so there, so, you know, again, that's separating out from the harms that the collections created, but you're making an assumption that these were collect, right? These are part of some positive benefit. But anyway, that's what I was thinking about in terms of responsibility. Like who's responsible for those? It feels like, you know, I mean, Dom, there's a question in our Q and A from Richard Frazier that seems like it's kind of pointing in the same direction, right? Are we the lesser of two evils, you know, for some of this material that's like going on the internet and being just sort of picked up and passed around? I mean, wouldn't it be better for us to take responsibility for these kinds of things if we're committed to this? I'm probably just playing in the question back at you that you've just formulated. No, it's quite possible that Richard and I have talked about this before. But no, but it's a, but I don't know the answer. And I mean, I want to know, I want it because there's people call and you want to be able to tell them something. But mostly the responsibility you're asking us to take is too great. Call your local health department. It's like a, you know, it's like a long list of unsatisfying answers that you give them. So Dominic, I got to put you on the spot again, but so one of the questions here, are there circumstances under which today the university would accept human remains for its museums or research? So we've heard that not its museums, perhaps, but of course research and anatomical gifts. How do you differentiate what we're talking about here from what is a big part of what the medical school does, which is managing people and making anatomical gifts with their bodies? I'm, I'm like, I'll just bounce that question back to you, Bob. I mean, in some ways that's easier, right? I mean, as far as we think about consent now it is at least for those. Right, so is it consent that makes the difference? I guess is the question here. Is it consent that makes the difference? And, you know, so I, we do, in medicine, we keep specimens to teach with and we hope that those have been collected with consent and I think in today's world that would be much more clear than perhaps it was not that long ago, but we do see a role for human remains in education and research. And is it, is it just consent? Is that, is that the, I think that's probably a really important difference, but is that the main thing that makes the difference? Well, but what I was gonna say is, you know, I think consent is, is hugely important in part because we still live in a world where there, there are still vulnerable individuals who live in in vulnerable populations where consent is still not very often obtained. So you can think about continuing sterilizations of women of color in this country. Without consent against their will, it still happens. And so to me, that is, consent is, I'm not gonna, I can't sit here and say, it's the biggest thing, the only thing, but it is seriously important, particularly given that we still have many instances where the most vulnerable people in our societies don't get to give consent. So I want, I want to send to be a bar here for continuing to have individuals who they choose to have their bodies for research. That's one thing. But if, if, if, if we, I think we have to think about it even more deeply to say, if we have some people who choose to give their bodies research, does that enable other people who say, well, we, these are the kind of people we don't ever have to ask if they consent, if they want their bodies to be used in that way. And we, and we still live in that world and I worry about that. Who gets to give consent? Who has bottled the autonomy in this country? And who does not have bottled the autonomy? In the last few minutes here, let me turn to a slightly different issue, which is sort of cultural artifacts and those sorts of things. So if I understand it correctly, that this, that is built into NAGPRA, as you've described it, right? That it's not only the remains, but also cultural artifacts that need to be returned. Do you see an analogy here at all to the return of remains of enslaved individuals? Is there, is there a corresponding obligation do you think that is going on here that, that or is it just separate? And that's just NAGPRA and it's rather unique to Native Americans that cultural artifacts are included. I mean, you know, I didn't know about this until recently, but I realized that Harvard returned chief standing bears pipe tomahawk to the tribe. So that was a, you know, clearly an artifact had nothing to do with remains. Is there an extension of that into what we're talking about now or are they just two different subjects? Well, I don't know that I would want to sort of separate them out too rigorously, but it is human remains that really drive much of NAGPRA and the sort of affective connection of communities to their ancestral dead. And there's a series of questions about sort of like, what's the time dimension here? And I think for a lot of native folks, they say the time dimension is sort of whatever date, our anthropologists want to put and our archeologists want to put on human habitation here that that's the timeframe, right? Native folks feel that sort of commitment to that space. So it is really sort of human remains really drive much of the force and power of NAGPRA, associated funerary objects, when it comes to sort of non-human things, that is really the secondary sort of consideration. But the cultural patrimony and sacred objects part of NAGPRA is super important. And it comes from a very specific history of sort of salvage anthropological collecting in the late 19th and early 20th century, much of which was often just incredibly vicious. Sometimes market driven, sometimes I mean, there's famous accounts of people who are off in a different place, people come in and they completely just raid their village and take all their stuff. People who are trying to practice the potlatch and oops, that's against the law and they come in and they take all their stuff. So these kinds of claims around those sorts of objects come out of a very particular kind of history. And as I said, I don't know that I'd wanna make a rigorous kind of distinction between these things, but they do feel they've each got their own sort of impetus and force I think that kind of underpins them. Yeah, I'm looking at one of the comments here in the box, someone wrote, I'm struggling with the transition from the phrase, his skull is here in the collection to the phrase, he is here in the collection. And I suspect that different communities are gonna have different ways of looking at that and that for some communities, that skull is still, it retains some of the personhood of the person it once was. And that has particular meaning for some that may not be true for others. Evelyn, do you see parts of African American history and the cultural artifacts associated with that as having some similarities here or deserving of, or not deserving, but we need to pay attention to and give special attention to? You know, I do. And I think that, you know, there've been historians and other folks who've been, thinking about these issues for a really long time without any kind of, that work not being very visible and in some respects, in some instances not well respected but I do think that now that we are turning our attention to these questions that those objects are definitely part and parcel of a kind of need to remember and repair. So yeah, I do think that there are certainly communities and individuals and families who do imbue those objects with a great deal of cultural and personal and familial significance. And I think we're gonna see more folks talking about that as we go forward with support for really identifying those objects and bringing them to the fore and situating them in the particular context. I'm gonna just turn here in a moment for final reflections but question for Jane. Jane, would your museum accept relics from, you know, some church in Europe? Would that be considered an impermissible human remain? I, that's an interesting, the Peabody doesn't really have that area of as part of our collections anyway but let's assume, you know, let's think about the libraries recently had a donate, I can't remember all the details, it's somewhere in the report with a file that had some bones from a saint. It was a reliquary, which there's a recent acquisition. So is that sort of the type of thing you're referring to here? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, because I think that was, I think it's very different, right? Because it just feels different to me. I'm not really explaining why. So I'm gonna ask Phil because he's so much better at explaining than I am in terms of, yeah, what it means with different communities. You know, yeah, I'm gonna stop talking because Phil does it much better than I do. Oh, thanks for throwing that to me. I mean, you know, historically, right? Some saints reliquaries, you know, may actually have human remains and many of them actually are simply manufactured objects, right, that take on a certain kind of significance, right? But may or may not actually contain that bone or that lock of hair. I mean, I think it's a really interesting question, this question, like when does the language sort of get us into either complicated or useful or unhelpful kind of place, right? When does his skull turn into he? My student, Anthony Trujillo describes the Peabody as the Harvard's largest Native American dormitory. And he uses the word dormitory on purpose because he sees these as sort of sleeping entities, right? Who are still very much, you know, alive and many, many Native folks who, when they're thinking about the human remains in museums feel an obligation to, you know, tend to these, right? To sort of like continue, you know, a kind of cultural practice, right? Which is, you know, funerary and mortuary and spiritual. And I think this is the word that, you know, is hard to throw into this conversation, right? But for many people, there's a spiritual component, you know, to what we're talking about that's hard for us to account for in the language and the structures and the institutional kinds of bodies that we, you know, that we have, but, you know, whenever we're dealing with Native folks in the museums, I mean, this is the thing that comes to the fore. You know, you work with the NAGPRA reps and you're going through all the administrative kinds of things, but when a repatriation or a disposition happens, right? They're there and the first thing that happens is you get in a circle and everybody smudges and it's, and there's prayer and it's a very spiritual kind of encounter. You know, certainly for us at the National Museum of the American Indian, the NAGPRA staff goes through all kinds of has many opportunities for cleansing and purification, you know, to deal with sort of the difficulties, the spiritual and emotional difficulties of, you know, of the work itself. It's one of the reasons why I've always felt that the most important thing we can do when we're thinking about NAGPRA, or I think in this expanded mandate that we have for thinking about human remains more generally and in the remains of potentially enslaved people is that folks who are on the ground doing this work who walk into that room on a daily basis, right? These are the people who absolutely fundamentally need, you know, our love and support because they're doing incredibly hard work and they're encountering things that oftentimes they don't wanna talk about and things that we don't necessarily understand. And it's not crazy to think that that is also should be part of our worldview and our sense of accommodation around this kind of work. Wow, that's kind of a beautiful way of sort of wrapping us up here. Evelyn, again, thank you for your leadership here. Any just closing words before we close the session? Well, thank you. I'm so glad to have been here and I'd love to talk to these guys all day long every day. So it's always a journey with us. I think one of the things I just wanna say my own personal focus right now is really trying to think hard about memorialization and what it means and I'm doing some visits to various sites around the world actually to try to see how other folks have tried to think about memorialization or enacted or already installed memorials, say in South Africa, in Belgium, in Germany and different places. And because I think we're gonna have to think hard about how we want to do that going forward. And as I said before, this is the end of the beginning and I'm actually, you know, I think I just, it's work that I feel good about being a part of as well as just being in conversation with these incredible colleagues all the time. This is important work for the university and I think it's a good moment for us to take it seriously. All right, well, thank you for all of you as the panelists and thank you for all of you who are out there in Zoom land. Appreciate your participation, your great comments in the chat box and I guess with that, I'll say good night to everybody. Thank you. Goodbye.